Real estate no longer the hot career
I’ve written about residential real estate for a little more than 10 years now. For most of this time, real estate careers were hot. Everyone wanted to be a real estate agent or home builder. And why not? Homes sold quickly for much of the last 10 years, and when they sold they fetched sky-high prices. As a real estate agent, it was easy to make some big commissions.
Home builders, too, made big money during the residential real estate boom, which ran from about 2001 through 2006. Again, people snatched up new homes and paid big price tags while doing it. Builders erected sprawling subdivisions that sat farther and farther away from major metropolitan cities and their jobs.
Today, of course, this has all changed. Homes are sitting on the market for months. When they do sell, their price tags are far lower than they would have been just two years ago. Home builders are going out of business in droves, and their subdivisions sit either unfinished or with multiple vacancies.
I read a story in the Chicago Tribune this weekend that demonstrated just how tough the real estate slump has been on real estate agents and home builders. Turns out, the National Association of Home Builders is cutting $11.5 million from its operating budget and dropping 52 jobs. The trade group, the largest for home builders, pointed to declining income from membership and trade shows as the culprit.
At the same time, the National Association of Realtors says its membership is down by 125,000 from one year earlier. It still has a healthy membership of 1.2 million, but the fact that the number of members is dropping is a sure sign that the real estate slump has taken its toll.
This weekend, I wrote a feature story for the Washington Post on another group of people feeling the impact of the housing slump: The men and women who make refrigerators magnets for a living. Real estate agents have long made up a huge portion of these companies’ customer base. With the numer of agents dipping, these companies, too, have had to make their own job cuts.
It’s amazing when you think about how much of our economy is based on the buiness of selling homes. It’s why we’re all hoping that the residential real estate market finally ends is long slump and begins to show at least some signs of life in late 2009, early 2010.
