In the early 2020s, the real estate industry experienced an unprecedented influx of new agents, even as much of the economy grappled with layoffs and hiring freezes. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, housing became a hot commodity – and a wave of Americans seized the moment to reinvent themselves as real estate agents. In 2021 alone, the National Association of Realtors® (NAR) added a record number of members, pushing its ranks above 1.5 million for the first time in history. More than 156,000 people obtained real estate licenses in 2020–2021, nearly 60% more than in the two years prior. While nearly every other job sector struggled to hire, “what’s amazing is we keep hitting new high after new high,” observed Lawrence Yun, chief economist for NAR, referring to the swelling pool of agents during the pandemic.
Why did so many flock to real estate? A perfect storm of factors made selling homes look irresistibly attractive. Home prices were skyrocketing – the median U.S. home sold for about $408,000 by late 2021, up 13.7% from the year before, which meant potentially big commissions for agents. (Agents typically earn around 2–3% of a home’s sale price for representing a seller or buyer, so a single average sale could gross an agent $8,000–$12,000 or more.) At the same time, the pandemic’s economic turmoil left many workers burned out or unemployed, prompting them to rethink their careers. Real estate offered promises of flexibility and autonomy – the chance to be your own boss, set your own hours, and work from anywhere – which was alluring to people craving a change. “Real estate made so much sense,” said Maggie Gwin, a Los Angeles actress who turned to selling homes when Hollywood sets went quiet in 2020. She figured a real estate career would let her support her family while still going on auditions, and she wasn’t alone in eyeing the industry. In fact, between January 2021 and January 2022, “how to become a real estate agent” was the single most Googled job-related search in the United States.
Featured Image by Zac Gudakov
Drawn by a Hot Housing Market and Flexible Work
The pandemic housing frenzy made real estate seem like a gold rush. Even in the middle of the pandemic, you talk to almost any Realtor, and they’ll tell you 2021 was their best year ever, Gwin noted, reflecting on the buying spree that unfolded as Americans raced to upgrade homes or relocate. Houses were selling at record-high prices, often in bidding wars – a dramatic surge in demand that translated into hefty commissions for those brokers who could get deals done. Unlike many salaried jobs, agent income is uncapped and directly tied to home prices. With prices up and properties sometimes selling within days, a diligent agent could conceivably make more money than ever, despite (or because of) the crazy market conditions.
The work-life balance aspect was another magnet. For people like Amy Bieganek, a 53-year-old restaurant veteran in Minneapolis, real estate offered a lifeline when her long-time waitressing job vanished due to COVID-19. “Being in the restaurant industry, I never thought I would be out of a job,” Bieganek said – but by summer 2020, her restaurant had closed permanently. She decided to pivot to real estate, investing about $3,000 in licensing classes and fees, and earned her Realtor’s license in early 2021. The field felt like a natural fit: “It’s another hospitality job,” she explained, noting that her people skills from decades of waitressing helped her smoothly transition into guiding clients through home purchases. Many others made similar leaps from hard-hit industries into real estate. From burned-out healthcare workers to office professionals suddenly working remotely (or laid off), people across the country began to see real estate as an accessible new career path during the pandemic’s great shake-up.
New agents came from all walks of life: single parents seeking a side income, former military personnel and teachers looking for second careers, as well as retirees and college graduates. For example, Isaac Teplinsky, 25, had just started a marketing job out of college when COVID-19 hit – he was laid off only months later. Living back home, he binge-watched “Million Dollar Listing” and decided to give real estate a go. He got licensed in 2021 and soon sold a handful of houses, viewing the first year or two as an “investment” in a new career (much like grad school, but without the tuition) to hopefully reap rewards down the line. In Austin, Texas, Mike Mogavero made an even bolder leap: in his 50s, after a long tech sales career, he used a Groupon for real estate classes to get licensed just as Austin’s housing market exploded. With an influx of Silicon Valley buyers in Austin, Mogavero’s timing was perfect – he closed over $30 million in home sales in 2021, a volume that stunned even him. “The satisfaction you get from helping people buy a home is vastly different than selling software,” he said, reflecting on his career change. Stories like these – a mix of entrepreneurial zeal, pandemic necessity, and serendipitous timing – were surprisingly common during the housing boom.
A Reality Check: Many Won’t Make It
For all the hype, selling real estate isn’t an easy money gig. The flood of new licensees in 2020–2021 means competition is fierce – and the harsh truth is that most of these newbies won’t achieve the lavish success they might imagine. Industry veterans warn that as few as 1 in 10 new agents will still be in the business long enough to make a full-time living at it. “It’s a really empowering feeling to be your own boss,” said Ken H. Johnson, a former broker turned real estate economist at Florida Atlantic University. “But it’s usually around a year [in] when you look around and realize, ‘I can’t do this.’” The attrition rate in real estate sales is notoriously high – many agents drop out after slogging for months without consistent income.
Why is it so tough to survive? First, earning income takes time. It can take weeks or months to close a deal and get paid, and a new agent may have no clients at the start. Even when a sale does close, an agent doesn’t keep that full 2–3% commission – brokerage splits, marketing costs, and taxes easily eat up 30–50% of the gross commission. And there are ongoing expenses: licensing fees, MLS dues, association memberships, insurance, advertising, lockboxes, client lunches – you pay for all of that out of pocket. Meanwhile, bills don’t stop. Many who enter real estate end up working part-time or burning through savings while they build a client base. “Should there be a slow month… agents don’t get paid,” one industry report noted bluntly. Unlike a salaried job, there’s no guaranteed paycheck in months with no closings.
The statistics paint a sobering picture: A recent study by the Consumer Federation of America found that **49% of agents surveyed sold one or zero homes in the past year, and fully 70% closed five or fewer deals.. In other words, the majority of licensed agents are barely active or only dabbling. The median Realtor logged just two sales in a year. It’s no surprise, then, that median gross income for Realtors was around $55,000 in 2022, and a sizable share earned under $35,000 (before expenses) – far from the image of easy riches. In fact, many newcomers never sell a house at all. Stephen Brobeck, a senior fellow at CFA who analyzed agent activity, noted that over one-third of agents didn’t sell a single home in 2023.
Given these challenges, it’s common for new agents to keep another job while trying to break into real estate. “Helping people makes me happy,” said Ricardo Cooper, a 32-year-old in Washington, D.C., who in late 2020 added “Realtor” to his résumé – on top of his full-time nonprofit job and a pandemic contact-tracer gig. Cooper managed to close a half-dozen home purchases in his first year, mostly for friends and acquaintances, but he’s held onto his other income streams for stability. Likewise, Amy Bieganek – despite getting her license in 2021 – still waitresses a few nights a week to pay the bills as she slowly grows her real estate clientele. “I hope to go full-time [in real estate] in a couple of years,” she said, tempering her expectations. These experiences underscore a key point: real estate is often a grind, especially at the start. New agents usually begin by working with buyers (often friends or family looking for a home), since landing a listing – representing a homeowner in selling a property – is much harder without a track record. Yet listings are the lifeblood of a lucrative real estate career, particularly in a seller’s market. As Johnson, the economist, notes: “Brokers who focus on listing property… make more money on average” than those who primarily work with buyers. But in an inventory-starved market, getting listings as a rookie is an uphill battle.
Those real estate agents who do succeed often put in long hours and hustle relentlessly. Carolyn Lee, the ex-healthcare manager, discovered that even though real estate felt less emotionally draining than running a COVID clinic, it still demanded a full-throttle effort. Early this year, shortly after getting her license, Lee trudged through a snowstorm in the Seattle suburbs to show a home the moment it hit the market. Her clients loved it, so she helped them write an offer that night – and they won, beating out six other bidders. “You have to be willing to do what it takes, especially right now,” Lee said of launching her career in such a competitive environment. The episode also highlights how crowded the field has become: with far more agents than available listings, it’s often a race to be first through the door with your buyer and an exercise in creative deal-making to stand out.
Too Many Agents, Not Enough Homes
By the end of 2021, the United States had a record number of Realtors but a historic shortage of homes for sale. NAR membership surpassed 1.5 million agents in December 2021, yet that same month, there were only about 910,000 homes on the market nationwide – the lowest housing inventory recorded in decades. In other words, there were roughly two real estate agents for every listing out there. This imbalance meant intense competition not just for buyers bidding on homes, but among agents vying to get those listings and clients. In hot markets like the Sun Belt, the disparity was even more stark. States such as Florida, Texas, and Georgia saw their roster of Realtors swell by 7–10% in a single year, far outpacing the meager growth in the number of homes for sale.
Historically, booms in agent count tend to coincide with booming markets – and often precede shake-outs when the market cools. The mid-2000s housing bubble was a prime example: in 2005–2006, over 250,000 people joined the real estate profession, swelling the ranks of agents. Then the 2007–2008 crash hit, transactions plummeted, and thousands of agents left the field. NAR’s membership fell by over 10% after 2008 as reality set in. We may be witnessing a similar pattern now. After the frenzy of 2020–2021, the housing market started cooling in 2022 – mortgage interest rates doubled, home sales volume dropped sharply, and the rapid growth in Realtor rolls finally crested. By the end of 2022, NAR membership had hit an all-time high of about 1.58 million, but by late 2023, it dipped slightly (down 1.5–2% from the peak). Some major brokerages even stopped requiring their agents to be Realtors as industry scandals and legal challenges emerged, contributing to membership declines. “Reduced sales – like what occurred in 2022… can lead to more shakeouts,” NAR’s Lawrence Yun commented, noting that fewer home sales mean fewer commission checks to go around. With U.S. existing-home sales falling to around 4 million annually – the slowest pace in nearly 30 years – many of the pandemic-era newcomers are indeed finding it hard to justify staying in the business.
Brokerage firms have felt this shift as well. Take Redfin, a high-profile national brokerage: when COVID first hit, Redfin furloughed about a third of its agents, anticipating a housing slump. But within weeks, the market rebounded furiously, and by mid-2020, Redfin was scrambling to re-hire staff and recruit new agents to meet demand. “It was a nonstop hiring frenzy,” recalled Mary Gallagher, a recruitment director at Redfin, describing 2021’s breakneck expansion. However, by 2022, Redfin and many peers had to pull back on hiring as sales began to slow. The real estate rollercoaster of the pandemic – a sudden crash, an unexpected boom, and then a gradual cool-down – left even major companies guessing “week to week” how many agents they would need. Now, as the market readjusts to higher interest rates, some brokerages have cut support staff or merged offices, and newer agents without a solid foothold are feeling the squeeze. “Some who entered the industry during the pandemic … may have the ability to move to another industry as the economy continues its recovery,” Yun pointed out, suggesting that the easy opportunity perceived in 2021 has given way to a more challenging landscape in 2023 and beyond.
A Housing Market Paradox: Plenty of Realtors, Not Enough Homes
From an architecture and housing perspective, this real estate agent boom highlights a deeper issue: it’s far easier to add salespeople to the housing market than it is to add houses. During the pandemic, housing demand vastly outstripped supply – a dynamic that drove up prices and made real estate so enticing to agents in the first place. But the rush of new agents did nothing to address the underlying shortage of homes. By 2022, experts estimated the U.S. had a housing deficit of roughly 4 to 5 million units, a gap created by over a decade of under-building after the 2008 recession and exacerbated by booming household formation in the 2020s. In 2022, even though builders completed about 1.4 million new homes – the most in a single year since 2007 – it still wasn’t enough; the country added about 1.8 million new households that year, meaning the shortage kept growing. This chronic lack of housing inventory is the real root of the affordability crisis. It’s what led to those frantic bidding wars and record prices – and in turn lured so many people into real estate careers hoping to capitalize on the frenzy.
Seen through this lens, the pandemic agent boom can be viewed as a symptom of the housing market’s dysfunction. When home values surge 20% year-over-year, and every listing attracts dozens of offers, it’s natural that opportunists (and genuinely aspiring professionals) will pile into brokerage to get a piece of the action. But all those extra agents don’t build a single new home for the countless families in need of one. “The simple fact is there are not enough homes in this country, and that’s pushing homeownership out of reach for too many families,” observed Orphe Divounguy, a senior economist at Zillow. Many in the architecture and planning fields agree that solving this problem requires shifting focus to production – building homes, not just selling the scarce ones we already have. That means easing zoning restrictions, investing in affordable and multi-family housing, and finding innovative design solutions to construct more units quickly and sustainably. Recent analyses suggest that relaxing land-use rules even modestly in key metro areas could create millions of new homes over time, which would relieve pressure on prices and, by extension, likely thin out the ranks of agents as the market normalizes. In short, the long-term health of the housing market depends more on architects, builders, and policymakers than on having an ever-growing army of Realtors.
As we move past the peak pandemic housing frenzy, the real estate industry is settling into a new equilibrium. For consumers, having many agents competing for business can be a boon – it means plenty of choice and often more flexible commission rates or services. However, for the agents themselves, the road ahead is leaner. Those who entered during the boom are now learning what veteran Realtors already knew: this is a profession with high highs and low lows, and survival hinges on skill, persistence, and often a bit of luck. Some will persevere and flourish even in a slower market – by diversifying into rentals, leaning on tech and social media savvy, or focusing on niche segments – but many others will likely fade away, especially if the red-hot market that drew them in continues to cool.
The pandemic real estate agent boom will be remembered as a striking footnote to an extraordinary era in housing. It demonstrated how quickly labor can flow into perceived money-making opportunities – yet it also underscored the limitations of that influx. In the end, you can sign up a thousand new Realtors virtually overnight, but you can’t conjure new houses out of thin air. The true lesson for the housing sector might be that balancing supply and demand – through thoughtful development, design, and policy – is far more important than the number of agents chasing commissions. Until the nation builds enough homes to meet its population’s needs, we may continue to see “surges” of enthusiasm (and new agents) whenever the market heats up, followed by inevitable shake-outs when reality returns. It’s a cycle that both real estate professionals and architecture insiders will be watching closely as we navigate the post-pandemic housing landscape.
Resources
- Candace Jackson, “Why So Many People Became Real Estate Agents in the Pandemic,” The New York Times, March 4, 2022.
- TRD Staff, “NAR hit record membership in 2022, but expects a drop,” The Real Deal, Jan. 16, 2023.
- National Association of Realtors, “Quick Real Estate Statistics,” July 8, 2024.
- Phil Hall, “NAR Records 1.67% Year-Over-Year Decline in Membership,” Weekly Real Estate News, Jan. 5, 2024.
- Vivian Tejada, “Why So Many People Became Real Estate Agents During the Pandemic,” CitySignal, updated Oct. 26, 2022.
- Christy Murdock, “You sold HOW MANY houses last year? The Download,” Inman News, Jan. 6, 2024 (citing Consumer Federation of America report on agent activity).
- Zillow Research, “The U.S. is now short 4.5 million homes as the housing deficit grows,” press release, June 18, 2024.
