Quote:
Originally Posted by you&me
You're kind of conflating two different points I was making; one point was, yes, plenty of salespeople are compensated at higher rates than realtors... Your MRO sales guy vs the engineer, for example.
But the other point is that a lot of other salespeople have more training (degrees, accreditation, what have you), more accountability, or often both. An investment advisor that consistently loses their clients money will either be fired by their firm, or if an independent, unable to demonstrate a track record to attract new clients. That's not really the case with a realtor, particularly in the case of them providing bad advice to their clients.
Back to your example about the guy sells MRO... The main difference between a realtor and this guy is that the company he sells for acts as a gatekeeper to ensure certain standards are met and the company is represented in a positive way. Regardless of education, that company isn't just letting anyone run wild with their product... That would be disastrous for the company's image.
Whereas, the real estate agency model is set up to encourage as many people as possible to become realtors, regardless of their ability, so that they pay desk fees to the agency... What's the stat? Something like 5% of agents are responsible for 90% of deals?
The real problem is that this cavalier attitude is applied to a role that's been inserted into the biggest transaction of most people's lives... On that basis alone, the industry and the individual realtors in particular should be held to a standard equivalent to the significance of the transaction they're involved in.
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There are brokerages that operate like this and do have very high standards of who they take on; continued training requirements, competence standards, annual reviews with each agent, business plans required on application etc.
Then there are others that take on anyone who will apply like you've mentioned.
The odd part is why anyone hires agents from the latter knowing they are with a company with such low standards of conduct and are charging the same commission is the other companies with high standards anyway.
That agent also keeps more of that commission because the higher standard brokerage charge their agents higher splits.
So by hiring the agents from joe shmoe realty, consumers are actually paying that agent more than the professional agencies and getting the lowest standards to boot.