I am a real estate agent. I work with buyers and sellers. I also deal with some folks who seem to think I do this just because I love to drive them around all day and look at houses and I love it so much I will do it for days and days even though they can't buy a home or have no intentions of buying a home. They just love to look at houses and see how they are decorated and dream. They think Realtors® are rich or that we get paid just for driving them around.
Before I became a Realtor® and I am a Realtor® not just an agent (there is a difference) I'm not exactly sure what I thought about real estate agents other than I don't think it was good. I know I didn't trust them. Don't really know why but I just didn't. Right there with lawyers and used car salesmen.
So why in the world would I conscientiously decide to become a real estate agent? Sometimes I still wonder??? Actually I became a Realtor® because of my feelings and beliefs about them. I wanted to provide a service for buyers and sellers and be someone who was trustworthy, honest and would serve them with the highest ethics. I wanted to make a difference.
I am now in my 4th year of real estate and while I love helping buyers with this exciting and monumental step in their lives I still have days I want to give up and find a normal job with regular hours and a paycheck every week and vacations and other benefits that companies provide for their employees.
Before I became a Realtor® and I am a Realtor® not just an agent (there is a difference) I'm not exactly sure what I thought about real estate agents other than I don't think it was good. I know I didn't trust them. Don't really know why but I just didn't. Right there with lawyers and used car salesmen.
So why in the world would I conscientiously decide to become a real estate agent? Sometimes I still wonder??? Actually I became a Realtor® because of my feelings and beliefs about them. I wanted to provide a service for buyers and sellers and be someone who was trustworthy, honest and would serve them with the highest ethics. I wanted to make a difference.
Most realtors work very hard and we help a lot of great people fulfill their dreams of owning their own home and for that we do get paid well most if the For those wasted hours and money spent on gas we maketime. We also spend a lot of time drive hundreds of miles a year with people who really are not qualified to buy or sometimes really not ready to buy. Sometimes we work for buyers who are ready and qualified and invest time and money with them and then they buy from another agent who just writes up he contract and collects a commission or they buy from a FSBO without us even though we could help them with a FSBO also and they would be represented properly. For those wasted hours and money spent on gas we make nothing. In fact we are in the hole because gas isn't cheap and I don't know anyone else who works an 8-5 job who shows up for work, clocks in and then works a 40 hour workweek for free. A real estate agent has to budget because we may have 4 or 5 closings this month and then have months go by with nothing. We also pay all out own expenses because we are considered independent contractors and are taxed heavily for it. Nothing is cheap for us. Advertising, signs, office supplies, printing, even the brokerage where we hang out license get part of every paycheck we receive. At tax time we pay both employer and employee portion of our Medicare and FICA taxes.
ReplyDeleteMany people (including some agents) think we have a glamorous job. I never find it glamorous walking through nasty foreclosed properties being careful not to touch anything I don't have to or wading through mud showing properties on rainy days.
Real Estate is a tough business. In my 7 years as an agent I have seen many agents come and go. The reason is that it requires hours and hours of hard work, pretty much on call all the time, days off are often destroyed and hard to plan and it takes a while to build up a loyal customer base and enough pay to sustain your life and the business of staying in business. This is my 7th year and here it is mid March and it has been my toughest year business wise ever even though there are those who say we are starting to see recovery. Much of that is because with the recovery you have an abundance of new agents as well as seasoned agents who retired their licenses and baled when the market got tough now getting back in the business and competing for the sales and listings.