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player ready...It’s a bit of a head-scratching fact. Despite the downtrodden real estate market, at any given time, up to 30 people are sitting in classes offered by the Chicago Association of Realtors, learning the ropes to become licensed real estate agents.
Other newcomers to the business are sitting in similar classes offered elsewhere. On average, nearly 200 initial real estate agent licenses were issued each month for the first eight months of the year, on par with a year ago.
Make no mistake, this is not the rush to residential real estate that the industry saw in the early part of the last decade. Membership in the Illinois Association of Realtors, a trade group, is down 6 percent from where it was a year ago.
And while the number of commercial and residential real estate salespeople registered with the state is, at 43,305 people, relatively flat with the end of 2009, it’s still a 30 percent drop from the end of 2006.
Nevertheless, there is some sense that the time is ripe to get into home sales on the ground floor and learn the business while times are slow.
Real estate is an entrepreneurial field and it doesn’t cost much to be come an agent. It costs a few hundred dollars to take a class, and then the fees to take the test and register with the state.
“There are a lot of people who are risk-takers in life and love to set their own destiny,” said Bill Wald, a senior director of business and professional development at the Chicago Realtors’ group. “If they want to get into this in the slow time, imagine how good they’ll be in the good times. They’ll be brilliant.”
Right now they’re green, they know it and that’s to their advantage in working with buyers and sellers because they’re hungrier for a transaction, Wald said.
After a few decades in corporate America working for companies such as Dow Chemical and USG, Jody Wise’s real estate experience came from 13 moves, including the five times she’d sold one house and bought another.
When her position with Dow was eliminated last year, Wise and her daughter moved back to her hometown of Chicago, and in January she became a real estate agent.
“I did not go into it with my eyes closed,” Wise said. “It’s a bad market, but it’s a good time to learn. In the crazy market of ’05, you didn’t have time to absorb what you learned. There will always be a market, so the question is do I have the capabilities to garner market share for myself.”
She has participated in nine deals in nine months, and thinks some of her early success draws from her analytical skills and the fact that because she’s new to the business, she doesn’t “have any concept of what a home value should be.”
But she also acknowledges that moving from a salaried job to a commission-only structure can be nerve-wracking.
“There are all kinds of cliffs you’re standing on,” she said.
Recent college graduates also are flocking to the field, in part because job pickings are slim elsewhere, and they’re bringing with them social media skills that they think will help them build their business, particularly with first-time buyers.
When he graduated from college in December 2008, Mike Gaffney’s goal was to find a job in investment management or banking and eventually become a real estate investor. When that plan didn’t work, he decided to jump into real estate first — as an agent.
He relied on the commission from rentals, as do a lot of agents, and questioned his career decision. That was until April, when he not only got his first sale, but also participated in four closings, three of them tied to buyers seeking to capitalize on the federal homebuyer tax credit.
“I was hooked when I was balancing four different deals at the same time and was working with renters and was working 60 hours a week,” he said. “But it’s all on my own schedule, and I made it on my own.”
Gaffney knows he won’t go back to the corporate world, although he still plans on becoming an investor. Right now, student loans are his focus. “Homeownership is my future,” he said.
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