I'm not real sure what compelled me to look this up. Curiosity mostly. Maybe a warped desire to run pivot tables in Excel. Pivot tables are cool, in a geekish sort of way.
I went to the Arizona Department of Real Estate web site and downloaded a huge text file (18MB) of all the licensed real estate agents and brokers in the state of Arizona. I pulled it into Excel, parsed and massaged it a bit and came up with some interesting numbers for the Phoenix area…
There are currently 47,675 individuals in the Phoenix MLS area with an active real estate sales or broker's license. (7,694 Brokers licensees and 39,981 Sales licensees). Below is a table of the breakdown by city:
The data file provided by the AzDRE (which is available to the general public) provides a lot of information, including when the licensee was originally issued a real estate license. This of course means it is relatively easy to manipulate the spreadsheet and glean a little insight into how many years these 47.6K agents have been out there. Rather than bore you with all the gory details, here is a graphical snapshot:
The scale starts at 1950, because there is an agent in the area who first got their license in 1950. The most recent new agents were licensed just yesterday. There is an obvious peak in 2005, and since Arizona requires real estate licenses be renewed every two years, it will be interesting to see how many of those licensed in 2005 renew this year. There have been 1,055 licenses issued to date in 2007, which puts us on a pace for about 5,500 new licenses to be issued this year — equal to 2004's total (this assumes a linear rate for the remainder of the year, which may or may not be a safe assumption. I didn't dig that deep!)
It should be noted that just because there are 47,000+ people out there with active real estate sales and brokers licenses, that does not mean that all 47,000 are selling real estate for a living. There is no question that large numbers of people get a real estate license and do little to nothing with it. I would love to know how many of these license holders are working in real estate full time and actually earning enough to live above the poverty line based solely on their real estate sales income.
Much more statistical analysis could be done here, and I'm sure doing so would make my college Stats professor proud. But I never really did like that guy, and I'm sure many a reader's eyes are glazed over by now. So I'll hold off any further analysis.
What you have here though is enough data to support the fact that you can not swing a dead cat in the Phoenix metro area without smacking a licensed real estate agent upside the head.
Makes picking out a good one a challenge. But you guys all know where to go for that… 
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[tags]Phoenix Real Estate agents, AzDRE, pivot tables, waste of time[/tags]
I'm Jay Thompson, and I have a little blogging problem... 
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