If you are thinking about becoming a real estate agent, check out our free guide: becoming the best listing agent in your area. For a full guide on required listing agent services such as photography and virtual tours, social media marketing, local marketing, and what lightning Lister can provide you as a Lightning Lister partner agent.
Median real estate agent salary: $51000(google). This does not account for gas and car maintenance, as well as advertising costs. This also does not tell you the amount of time put in to making this which is anecdotally more than 80 hours per week, especially when starting. This figure is also largely based on the values of homes in your area as well as the commission rate you would like to set for yourself, or what your brokerage requires.
Real estate agents are a form of sole proprietorships, or one-person operations. This is of course initially, but when you get to the point where you are obtaining many deals, then the employment of other services such as transaction coordinators, photographers, and ancillary services is the only option to grow And scale the business. This is also the point which you can restructure your business into into an LLC to help with taxes – make sure to also add a competent CPA to your service providers.. a quick look at the statistics on real estate agent salary, as well as a brief scroll through agents in your local market may show you something about the average real estate agent. There are many real estate agents I have come across in my 15 years of real estate marketing that are not focused, or entrepreneurial minded, which is an absolute must to succeed in this game. (Firstly, this is an extremely saturated market with on average X number of realtors per ZIP Code according to some statistic I need to find) which makes real estate have a barrier to entry that is quite large. Secondly, and this is due to the first point, everybody knows a real estate agent. This is why, like any successful business, to be a successful real estate agent you need to distinguish yourself. So asking the question how much does a real estate agent make is not a great question because it lumps together every agent, both good and bad. A more appropriate question would be how much can I make as a distinguished real estate agent, and what can I do to distinguish myself, because everyone may know a real estate agent, but not everyone knows a GREAT real estate agent. (Reading our article on what makes a great agent and our in-depth guide can help you obtain a very good living as a real estate agent). After the first year you will know if this is for you or not, as this job requires cold calling, cold mailing, local area marketing on social media oand other avenues, customer relationships nurturing and providing amazing services at super competitive rates such as 1 to 2% listing fees without skimping on any of the marketing; this is in addition to the knowledge you must have of local market and laws governing real estate, probabilities and statistics for client expectations, and being available for your customers when they need you. The real estate licensing exam is a great way to prepare yourself for a lifetime of learning, and an introduction to real estate laws and issues, but the business side is something you must learn in addition to this. This is what makes lightning Lister such a valuable resource for agents – you sign up for a ZIP Code(s) and lightning Lister takes care of the rest, implementing marketing required to obtain clients and establish you as a dominant listing agent. (Why should you focus on being a listing agent? We made an entire article about that which you can read here.)