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Real Estate Latecomers

Cooling market? Perhaps. But try telling that to the thousands of new sales people joining the Tampa Bay area housing industry.

When Brandon Realtor Connie Johnson hosted an orientation for prospective Tampa Bay area Realtors last month, she gazed into a mass of 165 freshly licensed agents hungry for advice.

Johnson didn't want to be a downer, but hadn't they heard the news? The bloom may not be off the real estate rose, but its petals are definitely showing the first signs of wilt.

"People think, "I got my real estate license and I'm going to make a fortune.' But first you've got to get clientele and that's not easy to do when there are 8,500 Realtors in Tampa," said Johnson, a 19-year veteran who works for Re/Max ACR Elite Group Inc.

Real estate has been so hot - and the workplace alternatives so tepid - that membership in the Tampa Bay Association of Realtors swelled by about 2,000 agents the past year.

Statewide, the number of Realtors and sales people has nearly doubled from 79,331 in 2001 to 154,558 in 2005.

But don't imagine a majority of these newly minted agents are destined for sales stardom. They're pouring into a market likely to contract this year. So many have entered the field that median yearly income for home sellers has been slipping.

Realtor groups predict a 5 percent decline in home sales, making 2006 the third strongest in history, but suggesting the housing cycle is downshifting.

"We would expect our membership to hold even this year. We're entering a period of slower sales," said Walter Molony of the National Association of Realtors.

That message has yet to reach students at the Tampa Bay area's two premier real estate schools: the Ed Klopfer and Bob Hogue schools of real estate.

Klopfer churned out about 25,000 graduates in each of the past two years, roughly a third of them in Pinellas and Hillsborough counties.

His most popular course is the 63-hour, $339 class for real estate sales associates, though Klopfer also trains aspiring mortgage brokers, home inspectors, appraisers and condominium managers.

"I'm on call 24/7. I sleep with my cell phone by my bed," Klopfer, a lawyer-turned-school-owner, said from his office in a Sarasota strip center.

Hogue, based in St. Petersburg, is apt to dispense friendly advice to students dreaming of mountains of moolah. Students who finish the classes and pass a state exam get a license that lets them sell houses.

"It's not the license. It's how good the customer service is once you have the license," said Hogue, whose school will teach 550 classes with 40 instructors this year.

"Those people who recognize that, it doesn't matter if the market is going up or down. They're going to do great."

Heather Barrow is among the neophyte Realtors with a fresh license and a desire to carve a name for herself in the business.

After leaving an accounting job at Ernst & Young, the University of Florida graduate started as a Realtor in December with Smith & Associates, the largest independent realty company in the Tampa Bay area.

No sales yet. But she's showing homes to a handful of prospective buyers, mostly in familiar south Tampa neighborhoods that Barrow has known since childhood.

The median price of homes in the Tampa Bay area was $223,200 in December. With most Realtors earning or sharing 4 percent to 6 percent commissions on homes sales, there's plenty of money to be made.

"Hopefully in the next couple weeks I'll have a closing," said Barrow, who's 26 and recently married. Her husband, Bennett, started a second career as a mortgage broker.

Barriers are few to becoming a real estate agent, making the field particularly popular among women seeking flexible jobs to supplement family incomes. One home sale pays for the state license many times over.

Smith & Associates has grown from 90 agents in 2003 to 200 in 2006. Since agents are paid by commission, there's little risk to hiring them. Good luck earning a living wage, however.

Realtors with two years of experience or less earned median incomes of $12,850 last year, according to the national association. That's almost equal to the U.S. poverty level of $12,830 for a family of two.

Incomes improve with experience. By the sixth year of work, Realtors can expect median incomes of $58,700. Industry veterans, those with 26 years or more, earned $92,600.

"We always tell the new person it's going to be a full year without income before they make it," Smith & Associates chief executive Robert Glasser said.

Johnson, the veteran Realtor, worries about the juxtaposition of receding home sales and an expanding work force.

As president of the Tampa Bay association in 1999, she was one of 3,300 Realtors. Membership now approaches 9,000, with thousands more recent real estate school grads ready to grab for gold.

"The dumb money is gone," Johnson said. "Don't misunderstand me: The business is still very good. But it's not as good as it was. It was really nuts there for a few months."