RE Agents - how is lack of inventory affecting your income?

[JD Martin]

@Russell Brazil @Dawn Brenengen @James Wise @Jonna Weber @David Greene @John Thedford @Nathan Gesner @Joel Owens @Jordan Moorhead @Brie Schmidt and hopefully a whole lot of people that I've missed -

I am curious - how has the lack of inventory affected your RE income? I can see how this can turn out two ways:

1. House prices are super high and everything gets sold, so agents are doing well;

2. Houses are scarcer than hen's teeth, and there's not much to go around so agents are having a rough time of it.

I ran some quick math numbers in my area yesterday and making a whole lot of assumptions (for example, only 40% of all local agents were party to a sale, everything that was available gets sold, etc) the math didn't seem to pencil out very well for agents right now. Houses are selling for a lot more money but there's nothing out there to sell. I asked my agent, who's a broker and part owner of the local KW (which is the firm that I have my RE license with but I'm inactive) and he says that he's doing pretty well but is mostly doing broker stuff and hardly selling anything, partly because there's nothing to sell. I've read a couple of anecdotal stories where agents said they were making minimum wage right now because of the lack of inventory (including one in the WSJ I posted yesterday). I figure that the best agents everywhere are probably still doing well, but I would still like to know how the historically low inventory affects income.

[Russell Brazil]

Way less total revenue to go around with way less houses for sale. But, all that revenue is pooling in the top tier of agents. So you have 2 different types of agents in this respect right now; 1) The bottom 90% of agents are getting absolutely hammered and making no money. 2) The top agents, particularly in the top 1% or 2% are having a record couple of years. I fall into the latter. 2020 was a record year for me, and Ill probably match that record in the first 6 months of 2021. We'll see how the rest of the year turns out, but at the pace Im currently at Ill be somewhere around the #40 agent in Maryland or #30 in DC for individual agents depending on which jurisdiction I decide to report my location for.