Someone called today, seeking advice on becoming a real estate agent in Phoenix. We chatted about the pros and cons, and then they asked, “So, how’s the competition? Just how many real estate agents are there in Phoenix?”

Good question. The answer off the top of my head was “a boatload”.

Just over a year ago, I posted that there were 47,675 individuals in the Phoenix MLS area with an active real estate sales or brokers license.

How does that look today?

Returning to the publicly accessible data at the Arizona Department of Real Estate, I down loaded a whopper of a file that contains info on current, expired and former license holders in Arizona. I culled and massaged it until I got all of the active sales and brokers licensees for both Maricopa and Pinal counties into one spreadsheet (barely).

As of May 8, 2008, there are 45,243 active real estate licensees of one flavor or another in Maricopa and Pinal counties — roughly the coverage area for the Arizona Regional Multiple Listing Service (ARMLS) which covers the greater Phoenix metro area.

There are currently 7,997 folks holding an active brokers license (up from 7,694 in March 2007) and 37,246 with an active sales license (down from 39,981 in March 2007).

While the overall numbers are down over the past 14 months, it’s not quite the exodus that many (myself included) thought would happen. 943 have received freshly printed licenses this year alone. The real estate schools are still churning them out, albeit at a slower rate than in the peak year of 2005. Yes, people are leaving the business, but new people are still coming in. I’ll dig through the expired and inactive licenses later and see if there is anything of note. I’m curious to see if there is any correlation between expired licenses and how long they were active (ie: is is just new people letting licenses lapse, or are the “old-times” getting hammered too?)

Of note, “active” license does not mean the holder is actively selling real estate for a living. It simply means the license is active from the Department of Real Estate’s perspective.

Many people get a real estate license and do nothing with it. Many property and commercial managers hold licenses, never intending to use them to transact physical real property. Countless hundreds (if not thousands) are part-time agents at best.

But still. 45,243 people with active real estate licenses in the Phoenix market qualifies as “a boatload”.

If you are interested in starting a career in real estate sales, be aware there are a ton of competitors. Many of which are absolutely brilliant real estate practitioners. Others… meh. Not-so-much. Pretty typical of any large industry.

How does this affect real estate buyers and sellers? Simple — you have a LOT of people to chose from. Choose carefully and wisely.

While there is far more than “years of service” that define a qualified real estate agent, time on the job is none-the-less an oft discussed item. As such, I present you with these summary statistics for the population of 37,246 currently holding a real estate sales license:

Mean number of years licensed: 6.8
Median number of years licensed: 4.1
Standard deviation: 6.9 (in other words, the “spread” is large)

Maximum time licensed: 49.8 years
Minimum time licensed: 4 days

Below are a couple of charts showing the number of agents with current licenses and the year they were first licensed. These charts reflect real estate sales licenses only — no brokers licenses. Why? Because the clock “resets” when one gets a brokers license. For example, my license date in the database is February 2008 — when I got my brokers license. There is no reflection of when I first got my sales license. This confounds the data so it’s best to separate sales and brokers licenses for this particular analysis.

Also, don’t look at this chart and think, “Wow, hardly anyone got a license between 1958 – 1976.” That is not true. This chart reflects the number of people currently holding a license. The simple fact is, everyone except one person who got a license in 1958 is either retired from real estate, passed away, or moved on to something else.

This chart is the same data, only from 1997 through 2007. It just gives you a better look at the last 10 years….

I’m relatively certain these types of posts bore many readers to tears. For that I apologize. But this blog is the best place for me to store data and trends for future comparison. And lets face it, some people like them.

Personally, I can’t help myself. I blame it on 20+ years in the semiconductor manufacturing industry. While not an engineer by education (I’m not counting those two hazy years of Chemical Engineering classes at UT), you hang out with engineers for 20 years and something is bound to wear off on you.

For better or worse.

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There’s a new splogger on the loose…

Blog.NoDebtMortgage.com (nofollowed, naturally), has found our humble abode and is stealing posts verbatim to populate their Adsense filled splog.

Unlike many of the content thieves out there, these folks actually have an email contact posted. We’ll see if they do the right thing.

Here’s a tip for you tschilling@nodebtmortgage.com, when this is displayed in “your” posts, you are committing a crime:

© 2007 Jay Thompson, Phoenix Real Estate Guy . If you are reading this outside your feed reader or on any blog other than The Phoenix Real Estate Guy, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact legal@ThompsonsRealty.com so we can take legal action immediately.

“Man up”, be a good net citizen, stop stealing and try writing your own content.

Now I’m off to relegate dozens of trackbacks to the spam bucket.

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I just updated to the latest release of Wordpress (2.5.1). The PHP executable plugin I was using didn’t play well, so I’m trying a new one. So far, that seems to be the only problem.

If you see something wonky, please let me know!

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As I was filling up today ($62, thank you very much), this truck pulled into the lot…

The first thing that popped into my head was, “Wow, there is a niche market for anything”. (followed closely by, “Wonder what it would cost to put “PhoenixRealEstateGuy.com across that truck?”)

Real estate coaches, brokers and whatnot will frequently preach, “Find a niche! Find a niche!”

And they are right. When Francy and I started out in real estate, we tried to be the be-all-to-end-all agents for everyone, everywhere. We’d go anywhere, and try to sell anything.

We can’t do that. Phoenix is a big giant city. Some real estate transactions need specialized knowledge. We take listings now on the east side of the Valley — roughly defined as east of Central Avenue. With buyers we’re even more focused geographically. We don’t ignore requests on the west side. We’ve found some agents that work that part of town that we know and trust and refer to them.

(soon, we’ll have a little announcement about Thompson’s Realty expanding that will greatly increase our coverage area. But mums the word for now!)

We are constantly thinking through this business, which is evolving fast. How “niche” do you go? What niche? A niche market in real estate can be geographical, demographic, size/type/style/age/cost of home, and more.

Selling phone service to jails and prisons is an awfully focused niche. I have no idea if they are making money (but the “skin” on that truck was not cheap). But it begs the question — do we narrow our niche even more?  

Maybe. One of the beautiful things about opening our own brokerage is we can run our business however we see fit. And if we find a niche we’re not in that we think needs to be covered, we can recruit the right person to cover it.

That, is a beautiful thing.

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Thanks to the good folks at Diverse Solutions (our MLS/IDX search provider), and the ever-growing wisdom of ARMLS (our MLS service), those using our Phoenix home search system now get to view much larger and higher resolution photos when performing home searches.

If you view full size photos, you’re now treated to large (640×425) images as opposed to the tiny photos previously served up.

This is a very good thing.

How do you see full-size photos?

Simple.

Go to the Phoenix home search page and navigate to a listing you like. Such as this one (coincidentally, one of our listings. Imagine that…)

You’ll see a screen like this one. Click “View full size photos” (where the arrow is pointing). While you are there, note the items in the red box – you can also print the listing, save it as a PDF file, email it to yourself or anyone you’d like, get a direct link to it, or bookmark it. You can also contact us too for more info or to schedule a showing.

But for now, click the full size photos link and you’ll get a nifty window on your screen with a large, hi-res photo like this:

Note: these screen shots have been shrunk significantly to fit on the blog page. The actual photos are much larger (about 4x the shown size).

You can click on the smaller photos below the large one to see them in all their glory.

Unfortunately, our MLS currently only allows six photos to be uploaded. Happily, that all changes on July 28 when our new MLS provider FlexMLS allows, get this, unlimited photos to be uploaded.

And of course the photo quality is completely dependent on the one taking the pictures. (We use Shannon, who actually gets paid to take pictures of everything from babies, to sculptures to real estate. She’s a great agent too!)

So dive on in. Relish the screen filling photos. It should make your on-line home search better and easier. And if you happen to find a particularly bad MLS photo, give Athol a shout….

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