If you’ve ever wanted a steady long-term career helping people find the perfect home, or if you’ve ever wanted more exposure to the real estate market overall, you might have considered becoming a real estate agent. With a real estate license in hand, you can help people find the perfect properties for their needs, sell properties for existing property owners, and possibly dabble in real estate investments of your own.
That said, becoming a real estate agent isn’t the career path for everyone. In this guide, we’ll explore some of the greatest advantages of becoming a real estate agent, and the type of people who make for great agents in the first place.
Why Become a Real Estate Agent?
These are some of the greatest perks of becoming a real estate agent:
- A long-term, steady career: People will always need help managing their real estate transactions, so becoming a real estate agent is the grounding for a long-term, steady career. You won’t have to worry about your job becoming obsolete, and you can hypothetically get a job almost anywhere.
- Property flexibility: You’ll also have significant control over what types of properties you sell. Many real estate agents, especially new ones, focus on residential properties, helping average homeowners find the properties of their dreams. But others focus on commercial real estate or help investors find rental properties.
- Personal interactions: If you love working with people, becoming a real estate agent may be perfect for you. You’ll work with buyers and sellers one-on-one, getting to know their goals and helping them achieve them. It can be extremely rewarding, especially if you’re a people person.
- Hours and workload flexibility: As a real estate agent, you can exercise a great deal of control over your hours and workload. If you’re hungry for more action, you can seek it out, and if you’re overwhelmed, you can refer potential clients to a different agent. Accordingly, you can optimize and reoptimize your workload to fit your needs.
- Unlimited potential income: Being a real estate agent is one of the few career fields where there’s truly no limit to the amount of money you can make. Because you’re often fully in control of the types of deals you manage and your current workload, you’ll have the potential to earn as much as you want. If you’re interested in becoming wealthy or scaling up your earnings over time, this is ideal.
- Better knowledge of the real estate market: Working in real estate gives you direct exposure to the market. After years of experience, you’ll develop an almost innate sense of the ebb and flow of the market—and you’ll get to know the neighborhoods in your chosen area quite intimately. If you’re a real estate investor, or if you’re just looking for a new home for your family, this can help you time your purchases perfectly.
- Access to better real estate deals: Speaking of real estate investment, having a real estate license can also give you access to better deals. You’ll have the option to see houses before they ever hit the open market—which means you can make an early, competitive offer. Given enough time and effort, you can scoop up a number of great deals, and improve your property investment portfolio.
Is Becoming a Real Estate Agent Right for You?
Of course, there are some downsides of becoming a real estate agent, including:
- A steep learning curve: While the basics of real estate are easy to learn, and you can become qualified to become an agent with a few dozen hours of classes and studying, it takes a ton of experience to become a successful real estate agent. Many new agents struggle with the steep learning curve.
- Inconsistent income: Even though there’s a practically unlimited income ceiling, most new agents have difficulty with inconsistent income. You may land a hot streak of property sales, boosting your income significantly, but you might follow that with a long drought, where you’re barely making any money. This makes the job stressful, and much harder to budget.
- Irregular hours and demands: Though you’ll have some control over your hours and workload, you’ll still need to meet your clients’ needs. This often means catering to their hours and availability, which means working irregular hours and meeting inconvenient demands.
Being a real estate agent can be stressful, but it’s also highly rewarding. If you’re interested in a career in this area, the first step is getting your real estate license, which is now possible through online classes. If you’re still not sure whether real estate is the right field for you, consider talking to and/or shadowing a current real estate agent to see what their job is really like.
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