There is a particular kind of tired that belongs to the American real estate agent. It is not the tired of someone who worked their shift, punched the clock and went home to supper.
It is the tired of a person who has been up since 5 a.m., who answered a text from a nervous first-time buyer at 11:40 pm the night before, who has put 140 miles on a leased SUV with a lockbox code written in ink on the back of her hand; someone who knows — as she pulls into her own driveway after dark — that she has not yet earned one dime for any of it.
She might not earn it this month, either. The inspection could turn up a cracked slab. The appraisal could come in low. The buyer’s cousin, who once watched a television show about flipping houses, could talk him out of the whole thing over Sunday dinner.
And all that work, the showings and the phone calls and the hand-holding and the pep talks in the car, will drift off like smoke from a burn pile. She will get up the next morning and do it again.
That is not a sad story. It is an American one.
Right now our industry is consumed by the big questions and the uncertainty they bring. Private listings. Consolidation. Commission lawsuits and the rules that came after them. Brokerages merging into brokerages that swallow other brokerages, until you need a flowchart to know who owns whose yard sign.
These things matter. We cover them at Inman every day, and we will keep covering them, because the people in this business deserve to know what is coming down the road at them.
But somewhere in all the talk of market share and listing policy, we, Inman included, stopped talking about the people. The ones who actually open the doors.
So let me talk about them for a minute.
No other place on earth built a creature quite like the American real estate agent. Other countries have agents, of course. They have people who handle property, file the papers and take a fee.
But this country, with its stubborn faith that a family ought to own a piece of dirt and a roof it can call its own, built something different. It built a small-business owner who carries her whole enterprise in a tote bag and a phone.
Who pays for her own signs, her own marketing, her own gas, her own health insurance, her own classes and her own mistakes.
Who has no boss to blame and no salary to fall back on.
Who bets on herself every single morning and lives with how the bet turns out.
If you want to see the good side of capitalism, the part that gets lost in all the shouting, ride along with one of them for a day. I have.
You will see a person who gets paid only when the job is done. Not when it is started. Not when it is almost done. Not when she tried real hard. She gets paid when the mission is accomplished, and a family has the keys. There is something old-fashioned and honest in that.
Plenty of people in this world get paid for showing up, for sitting through the meeting, for holding the title. The agent gets paid for results, and she took that deal with eyes wide open.
You will see a person who knows her town better than the mayor does. She knows which street floods when the creek rises and which middle school has the good band director.
She knows the old man on the corner lot has been thinking about selling since his wife passed, and she knows better than to bring it up until he does. She knows the contractor who will show up and the one who will not.
None of that lives in a database. It was earned on foot, one closing at a time, over years. I spoke about this very person at Inman Connect San Diego.
You will see a person who is, whether she signed up for it or not, a counselor. Nobody buys or sells a house in their calmest hour. They do it when a baby is on the way, when a marriage is ending, when a job is dragging them across the country, when a parent can no longer climb the stairs.
The agent sits at the kitchen table in the middle of all of it, holding the paperwork and the box of tissues, both.
And yes, sometimes you will see a person on a billboard.
I will not apologize for the celebrity agent. I know some folks roll their eyes. The bus bench with the big smile. The glossy ad in the back of the magazine. The agent with a television show, a following, and a name bigger than some of the brokerages she has worked for.
It is easy to poke fun at. But think about what it actually is. It is a person who started with nothing but a license and a phone and built a name out of thin air, until that name meant something in her market.
In a lot of the world, fame comes from being born into the right family or getting chosen by the right institution. In America, a woman who sells split-levels in a mid-sized suburb can put her face on the side of a bus and become, in her own corner of the map, a star.
That is not vanity. That is the American dream in good shoes and a name badge. Only a country that truly believes anybody can make it would let a real estate agent become a household name.
These folks are not a footnote to the American economy. They are a gear in its engine. Every sale kicks off a chain of other work: the lender, the title company, the inspector, the mover, the painter, the fellow who sells the new sofa and the kid who hauls it up the front steps.
Housing makes up roughly 15 to 18 percent of the nation’s GDP, according to the National Association of Home Builders, and more often than not, the agent is the one who gets the thing rolling. She is the spark plug.
Now, I am not naive. This business has its share of bad actors and lazy ones, same as every business. The industry is changing fast, and some of what is changing needs to.
The agents who thrive in the next 10 years will look different from the ones who thrived in the last 10. They will be sharper with data, clearer about their value and quicker on their feet. Buyers and sellers will demand it, and they should.
But when we talk about the future of this industry, I want us to remember who it is we are talking about. Not market share. Not inventory. People.
People who drive the extra mile, literally, and never bill for it. People who work on commission in a world that more and more wants a guarantee.
People who risk their own money, their own time and their own good name on the belief that if they do right by a family, the family will do right by them.
That belief built a good bit of this country. It built main streets and subdivisions and the quiet culs-de-sac where kids learned to ride a bike without training wheels. It built real wealth for millions of ordinary families who had no other way to build it.
So the next time you read another headline about consolidation or another thread about private listings, and you will — probably before lunch — take a second to think about the agent who is out there right now. Somewhere in this country, she is standing in an empty kitchen, flipping on lights, straightening a crooked picture frame, waiting on a young couple who are running late.
She has not been paid yet.
She is going to do it anyway.
Thomas M. Bohn
CEO, Inman.com
