ATLANTA – Kevin Dilbert has been working in private security for 10 years. He’s getting burnt out on the long hours, the inflexible schedule. For now, he’s keeping his day job. But on the side, he’s training to become a real estate agent.
As the housing market goes up, up, up, so does the number of people who hope to ride the wave. Schools like the Georgia Institute of Real Estate, where Dilbert was finishing a 75-hour prelicense class recently, are adding classrooms and instructors for the first time in years.
“We have seen a huge influx of new people coming in the business,” said Rebecca Fletcher, director at the GIRE. “They’re reading articles about how good real estate is. There’s a lot of frenzy. They have decided to get in.”
Dilbert called the class “mind blowing,” saying it was like a crash course in a new language. He wants to have a back-up plan for his private security career, but for others – like Denys Gryganskyi, a restaurant manager – selling houses is the main goal.
“When I first bought a house, I realized what I want to do,” he said. “I want to be a real estate agent.”
Before students like Dilbert and Gryganskyi decided to get in, plenty got out. The number of people with real estate licenses in the state – a category that includes sales agents and brokers – is 82,400, down 22 percent since 2006, according to Craig Coffee, deputy commissioner at the Georgia Real Estate Commission. About a quarter of those with licenses have them on “inactive” status.
Many who were inactive are now restarting their businesses, said Bob Hart, director of education for the Georgia MLS Training Institute. The Georgia Real Estate Commission does not keep statistics, but Coffee said he has been getting more inquiries from people whose licenses have lapsed.
Not everyone who gets a real estate license intends to use it to sell homes, said Christopher Burell, director of career services at Harry Norman Realtors. Some get the license to save fees on their plans to flip properties, while others intend to find jobs in commercial real estate or work for new-home builders. The lure of real estate, he said, is the ability to have more control over one’s own financial returns.
Nearly 3,500 people took the state’s real estate licensing exam for the first time in 2013, a 73 percent increase from the 2011 bottom. But that total is still far lower than the 12,517 test-takers in 2006.
Pame Childress Hewitt, director of the Barney Fletcher Schools, said she expects to have twice the increase in students in 2014 as she did in 2013.
“It’s definitely picking up, without a doubt,” Childress Hewitt said. “It’s a lot to do with the economy. ... When real estate starts to rise, education follows.”
But the industry can be difficult to break into. Tripp Anderson, who has been teaching since 1989, said student caliber has begun to slip as the housing market has improved. Quality has suffered because fewer new entrants are professional retirees and more are young people who have little business experience, Hart said. The barrier to entry is low, with classes costing $500 or less and the educational time frame short. Hart said many students don’t realize the amount of work that goes into building their businesses.
After two years, Burell said, only half of people who got into real estate are still active. It typically takes six to eight months for business to ramp up enough to get a paycheck.
Anderson’s class at the GIRE is harder than she thought it would be, said Martha Barrera, a project manager for an investor who has been flipping homes. Barrera decided to change jobs after people mistook her for a real estate agent when she did walk-throughs on those houses.
“It’s been challenging,” she said. “It’s definitely more detailed than I expected.”
In Anderson’s classroom, more than 30 students took notes from an overhead projector and answered questions about why a home’s cost per square foot is higher on the ground floor than the second (because the kitchen is the most expensive room in a house) or what happens if an appraisal is less than the agreed-upon sales price (the buyer can pay the difference out of pocket, or terminate the contract).
Students sipped coffee and whispered with classmates while they learned that Fannie Mae buys loans, but does not make them, and that Ginnie Mae subsidizes low-income housing. They determined financing for VA loans, and flipped the pages of textbooks when Anderson asked them questions they could not answer.
“We’re too near the end of this class to be this quiet and slow,” Anderson admonished them.
In 2006, Anderson said, “every Tom, Dick and Harry went to real estate school.” More than 50 schools that instruct potential real estate agents have closed or eliminated their Georgia offerings since 2008, leaving 292 authorized to teach in the state, Coffee said. But interest in the field is growing, and schools like Hart’s, Fletcher’s and Childress Hewitt’s are adding classrooms and instructors after years of hanging on.
Many of the students Anderson teaches see real estate as a way to make a lot of money very quickly, he said. While that can happen, it is not typical.
“They have unrealistic expectations,” he said.
The barriers haven’t kept people like Kristen Yehl from taking the chance. This has long been a dream for Yehl, who said she spends all her spare time studying.
“I’ve always wanted to be in real estate,” said Yehl, who had been unemployed since December, and recently started selling motorcycles. “I’m an outgoing person. I think I can sell.”
