How About Being An Agent And Do Real Estate Business?

User Question:

What do you think of real estate agent as a business? It seems easy to get a license to start with. We are buying a house anyway.

Answer:

Real estate business is too local, meaning it is not very scalable. Competition is intense, there are more agents-wanna-be, than customers :-(

I would not advise to do that, unless you can survive, say, the first 3 years. The first couple of years, you would spend just the time to get referrals/customers, so, it takes time to cultivate your customer base.

For example, I have a real estate friend who is quite successful, but he is working full time and doing real estate part time. He charges 2% only and has cash back to customers. So, you see, it is a cut-throat business.

He mentioned he didn't like it. On the surface, he got say, thousands of dollars as commission when the house is closed. But on the other hand, the moment his customer signed the contract, it meant that he just lost his "job". Basically, he had to start from scratch again to find the next customer/client.

Also, the money he got from a real estate transaction covered the whole couple of months or even over a year of time, when the customer just shopped around and didn't buy the house. So, it seemed couple thousand dollars is a lot of money, but in fact it was not, if you average it over a couple of months.