I quit

This will probably be my last post. As of a few months ago I am no longer a Real Estate Agent or Realtor. In this post I will lay out why.

Interest Rates

This is the primary reason. When interest rates were low, everyone and their mother was buying and selling. These people all locked in 2.5% interest rates, and then within a matter of months they skyrocketed to 6 and 7% and stayed there. To give you a very brief view of how this impacts the market: if you were to buy a $400k home @2.5%, you're looking at a payment of approximately $1264/mo. That same home financed @6% gives you a $1918 payment. So moving from one home to an equivalent home results in a 66% payment increase. And that's just the mortgage. Doesn't get into total paid over the term of the mortgage. So no one is moving unless they absolutely have to. I acquired 3 separate listings that I was unable to sell. Sellers would not face the new market pricing. I lost a bunch of money on each one.

Marketing

This is where it gets very personal. I learned a lot about myself. And what I learned really pertains to running any kind of business. And what I learned is: I absolutely loathe marketing. I also learned that marketing is the single most essential part of running any business. Running a successful business has very little to do with being good at your job or having satisfied clients, and a whole lot to do with how much and how often you're willing to harass people. And personally, I just lost the will. I worked on the other side of hundreds of different agents, and I would say maybe 20% of them were professional and gave me the impression that they actually knew what they were doing. Many agents were selling 100+ properties/year but also were so terrible at their job and difficult to work with that their clients were losing a bunch of money without them ever even realizing it.

My first broker invested pretty heavily in educating me. Many other brokers are "sink or swim", they give you a 6 week course and then dump you in the deep end. Probably within just a few months I started to realize that I knew more than the agents I was working with.

As an agent, I am harassed relentlessly, and it is miserable and infuriating. Lenders, real estate brokers, insurers (holy hell the health insurers don't stop), contractors, roofers, title companies, lead generation farms, "investors", not to mention Compass themselves were heavily pushing their "3-step marketing" (off-market) strategy (okay, maybe I'll make 1 more post about this because it's pretty fucked up). Probably 90% of the communications I received were spam. Calls, emails, texts, and so on. And for that reason I ignored a huge amount of communications from anyone that I didn't recognize. I started blocking calls from unknown callers. Started sending everyone who wasn't on an approved list of email senders to spam automatically.

I would regularly get emails from other agents at my own brokerage hocking their listings, as if we didn't create a centralized repository explicitly for that purpose. There were even tools built into the Compass platform for harassing other agents into finding buyers for your property. I also had other agents ask me if I was interested in joining their brokerage, and after I explicitly told them no, they would still send my name and number to their recruiter, who would then harass me for weeks about joining.

I consider this harassment to be theft of time and attention. You are stealing my time and attention in order to benefit yourself exclusively.

What I thought to myself was: This is absolutely miserable and infuriating, why would I want to impart that on anyone else, much less my previous clients who made the choice of supporting my business? The expectation of the broker is that you would contact past clients every 3 months. I would call, they wouldn't answer, I would leave a voicemail, then repeat the same 90 days later. Feels a lot like stalking. Or worse, they would answer and express frustration that I was calling them for non-business reasons.

The alternative is paid digital marketing, but that entire market is absolutely dominated by tech monoliths like Meta and Google, which are some of the largest, worst and most unethical companies on the planet that I absolutely do not want to support in any way.

I got paid Zillow leads for a little while but Zillow misrepresents you as the agent listing the property, and when you meet with them they expect you to know everything, and when you don't know hardly anything (because the only info you have is from MLS) they are annoyed and disappointed.

Since then I have deleted several email addresses and changed my phone number so those people will no longer harass me.

It just feels like you have to be a real disrespectful piece of shit to run a business in general. So that's my position.