Real estate jobs draw younger agents
By Catherine Burrough
The Arizona Republic
The long-strong housing market is drawing a slew of younger real estate agents.
Gannett News Service
The National Association of Realtors estimates that 75 percent of the 102,000 new members it signed up this year are "newcomers," meaning they have been in the business a year or less.
Azucena Smedstad, 31, a real estate agent for Coldwell Banker Success Realty in Scottsdale, Ariz., is one of many younger agents getting into the field. Another change is that more brokers are now women.
At the same time, the median age of a typical real estate agent dipped, and the percentage of twentysomething brokers climbed, according to NAR's 2003 member profile.
"A young person in college didn't think about real estate as a career 10 years ago," said David Lereah, chief economist at NAR. "But look at the economy. As many industries lose jobs, real estate has been hot."
Fueled by the new agents, NAR's membership recently hit a record 962,000.
Azucena Smedstad of Coldwell Banker Success Realty is one of Arizona's new agents. After running a restaurant with her husband for a few years, she decided last year to go to real estate school.
"I love it," said Smedstad, 31, who spends at least 20 hours a week selling real estate. "This is my thing."
The Arizona Association of Realtors reports its membership has climbed more than 25 percent since 2000. In the Valley alone, as many as 120,000 new and used homes are expected to sell this year.
Smedstad works primarily with Spanish-speaking clients and her friends.
The typical real estate agent now is 49, a year younger than the median age for the industry in 2001, according to NAR.
"A decade ago, the typical Realtor was a middle-aged mother starting a second career," Lereah said. "That's changed."
For the first time in the group's history, more real estate brokers are women than men.
The industry also is becoming slightly more diverse.
Since 2001, the number of non-Caucasian real estate agents has increased from 8 percent of all agents to 10 percent.
Lereah said the growth of minority real estate agents isn't fully reflected in NAR's numbers because many join other real estate organizations, and some people aren't comfortable answering the race question on a survey.
