<p>You can do lots of other things without a 2 or 4 years college degree and can make more than $50000 a year: home repair contractor, taxi driver (according to the driver taking me to the airport in Philly couple months ago he makes $60000 a year).</p>
<p>The average RE agent makes between 37k and 48k.
If you make 58k you are in the Top 10%.</p>
<p>source: salary.com</p>
<p>^^ Brokers also make more… So if you are an agent for 2 years then you become eligible to become a broker … so those stats aren’t 100 percent accurate because most agents that stick around earn the designation of broker.</p>
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<p>I think 1/2 the work is in serious trouble. More places are sprouting up to charge 1% or less on the selling side to list in MLS. - in other words, the sell side is becoming a commodity.</p>
<p>Buy side will be there as long as there are people willing to pay 3.5% for someone else to do the search work. There is also the security issue of limited access to the lock box to get into your house. So, the buy side is probably safe for a while.</p>
<p>^^^ Apples and oranges. Those stats are accurate for agents which is what this thread is about.</p>
<p>You commented that you know many agents who make over 100k. They are in the stratosphere for that profession.</p>
<p>Besides, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics the median broker salary was 58k.</p>
<p>Don’t get me wrong, it is a fine profession. But don’t look at the cream of the crop who are making over 100k and wonder why college kids just don’t do that. Besides, you have no idea if that cream of the crop went to college and picked up skills that helped them make that much money (marketing, sales, negotiation, networking skills, etc).</p>
<p>@Operadad… I guess the buy side will hold up since the buyer isn’t paying the commission.</p>
<p>BTW, Freakonomics had a great analysis of the real estate agent/seller interaction.</p>
<p>IIRC, their goals were not well aligned since the buyer may want to hold out for more money, but since the selling agent is only getting around 1.5%, they want to get the deal closed quickly and move on to the next deal. So an agent may want to convince their seller discount the home by another 30k to close the deal since they only lose $450 before taxes, but the seller is losing 30k.</p>
<p>Good way to lose repeat business and recs. Good agents do their best on each assignment for their client. Also income varies greatly by area. Those in good markets make way more than those in small towns. 3% of 700K is way more than 3% of 125K. Same or less work.</p>
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<p>Yes! I loved that section of the book… and there was a lot to love. That book was DD’s summer reading assignment and I read it along with her. Excellent!</p>
<p>BTW, this thread reminds me of a personal story about a guy with whom I shared office space for 8 years. He was not a real estate agent, but a financial adviser. Got his HS diploma on the GED program, never spent a day in college, snagged a job in a stock brokerage firm where his dad worked, and started out selling penny stocks to trailer park retirees. By age 50 he had his own practice with $100 million under management. He then sold his business for $3 million cash and retired. Meanwhile, I got a four year degree, then a law degree, and I’ll be working 9-5 plus two Saturdays a month until I drop dead. In the 8 years we shared office space, I never came close to making what he made per annum.</p>
<p>Some people in Hollywood make millions, doesn’t mean I am going to give up my job to try that either. Most people in real estate do not make that kind of money. The few that do usually have worked endlessly to build up to it. </p>
<p>If you want to go in to real estate, go for it. But realize that few make that kind of money.</p>
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<p>Maybe you might lose repeat business and recs, but I seriously doubt it. Few clients feel that they are more qualified than their agent (if they were, why hire one?), so aren’t they already predisposed to accept what their agent says? Also, the amount of times an agent will see the same client in their career is very small, as far as I know. I could be wrong, I’m no expert.</p>
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<p>Not so fast there Buckaroo. There are agents springing up that are sharing the commission with the Buyer. It is only a matter of time before there is a large segment of the buy side that figures out how to minimize the RE Agent, and thus their share of the sale.</p>
<p>Buyer’s Agents may become more fee for service (each showing) rather than a % of the sale. Ironically, the Fair Housing laws may accelerate the decline because RE Agents are not allowed to share knowledge (which schools are better/worse, which areas are more/less safe, etc.) because it could be interpreted as illegal steering. Why would you pay for expertise if they can’t legally provide that expertise? The best a Buyer can hope for is: Don’t question what the RE Agent does not show you. However, you don’t know if that is because they are doing their job (steering you away by omission), or because they are not doing their job (too lazy to search).</p>
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<p>It’s true that real estate agents need churn to make money, sort of like all brokers, but many people who try to sell their own house without an agent tend to overestimate its true market value, and they don’t have the time or savvy to locate the kind of people who might be seriously interested in buying the property. The agent is a matchmaker. People don’t tend to evaluate their own homes with a on objective, market-informed eye. Also, a good real estate agent can be a helpful liason with inspectors, brokers etc. Sellers have a lot of potential legal liability these days. A realtor can be the connection to reality that a seller needs to get a reasonable sale price that is not fantasy-based in a reasonable amount of time.</p>
<p>I have sold property both with and without an agent. Most realtors grossly overestimate the difficulty in selling yourself, and most homeowners grossly underestimate how time-consuming the process can be.</p>
<p>As long as someone can be realistic about the time commitment, and is prepared to supplement their own knowledge with other professionals (I hired a lawyer much earlier in the process than I would have, just to make sure the initial sales contract indemnified me from pretty much everything) they can sell on their own.</p>
<p>Travel agents vs. Expedia; Borders vs. Amazon. I still patronize my local bookstore since I like books and like my bookstore… but haven’t used a travel agent since god knows when. And unlike saving $8 on a book or $50 on an airline ticket… I saved 20K by not using a realtor on my sale. So even if the value of my time chewed up 4K of that…</p>
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We are getting off topic, but an agent is certainly allowed to share objective facts, such as school A has higher test scores than school B or area A has less crime than area B. You can’t say “family neighborhood” but you can say the school bus stops on the street. You can’t say “walk to train” but you can say “train station is 1/4 mile away”.
The days are long gone when MLS was in paper books that were guarded by agents as if they were top secret documents. Listings are all on-line and searchable these days. When DW gets a buyer, the first thing she does is set up an automated email that sends them every property that meets their criteria, such as town, price, number of bedrooms, etc. They see everything. And DW will show them whatever they want.</p>
<p>Buying and selling a house are the biggest financial transactions most people will make in their lives, and most people do it very infrequently and want help with it, so I don’t see agents going away any time soon.</p>
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Brokers only make more if they open up their own office and get agents to work for them. You don’t get a bigger cut of the commission just because you passed the broker test.</p>
<p>To the OP – If you think you’d like it, and for the moment you have a roof over your head for which you do not have to pay, GO FOR IT. Give it two years (it will likely take at least one year to even close enough for some kind of sustenance.) But be prepared to completely commit to the field during that time to give it a fair shot. You will need to get in touch with your math-capacity when it comes to amortization rates and data aggregation, however 
But that’s not exactly higher order calc.</p>
<p>I worked in ICI/Commercial right out of college, and worked on the legal end for a very upscale residential company in my early 20s. (I am now in a completely different field more related to my degree…but learned a lot about business from real estate ;))
Today, I happen have a few very successful real estate broker/agent clients, so I keep an eye on the industry. </p>
<p>One of my clients closes more than 70 transactions a year, and deals primarily in high end homes, which tend to take a very long time in terms of sales cycle. I will tell you the most VALUABLE thing she tells young agents starting out:</p>
<p>You will build your business on first time buyers. Never ignore, belittle, or otherwise be unavailable to first time buyers…It’s your bread and butter and it’s the opportunity to generate repeat business for the rest of your life.</p>
<p>I think that in a nut shell is the best advice a young agent can get. </p>
<p>One other note. There’s a lot of talk about what real estate agents make, and a lot of salary surveys. I’m just going to mention here that very often those figures are not really comparable to salaries from a corporation in that as an independent contractor, there are a great number of expenses written off in the AGI.</p>
<p>So “$50k” to a real estate agent is not the same as “$50k” to a wage slave per se. I know several agents living lifestyles well above average. But in this industry, the percentage of those who are successful is just wildly more variable than in other professions.</p>
<p>My best friend is a travel agent. She makes way more than I do as a nurse. Her salary is over $100K. She also works ALL THE TIME. Her bread and butter is business travel, and then those clients call her back for their personal travel needs.</p>
<p>Twenty years ago, she thought the internet would put her out of business. She’s still got more work than she can get done in a normal day.</p>
<p>So, you never know. The OP could be one of the outliers. There are Dallas agents who are so successful they are making hundreds of thousands per year. Yes, they are the minority, but they are definitely out there.</p>
<p>If you sell your own home there is no way to know if you really got full market value or not. I just sold one of mine to the tenant. I got what I thought was a fair price but I would never claim I got the highest possible price. To me the bird in hand value was very high as was the lack of effort and hassles. I can leave a little on the table under those constraints.</p>
<p>^^^^ sure there is. Simply look at what similar homes in the area have sold for. As far as getting the best possible price, that is something you will never know . . but the object is to get a fair price for fair value.</p>
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<p>If you have three years to spend in law school and the willingness to spend hundreds of thousands, have at it. Far better to get a masters in law. The only reason to go to law school is to qualify for the bar, to pass it and to be a practicing lawyer. Any other reason does not justify the time or expense unless a person has nothing better to do with their time. The degree is hardly versatile, that is just a bill of goods sold by law schools to market themselves to kids, many of whom will eventually will be unemployed lawyers with lots of debt. </p>
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<p>I would agree here. Except for the top tier laws schools, arguably the top 8 or so, legal employment is pretty much pathetic across the board, the fudging of placement statistics notwithstanding. Liberty, being unranked, is simply a little more pathetic than the better schools. The relatively few and lucky kids from the very top schools who get big law should have at least four or five years of full time employment before they are kicked to the curb.</p>