Something like 2% of the California work force has a real estate license! I heard this twice on CNN this morning. Is it true? What are they going to do for food?
In my looking for houses here in La Jolla – my biggest turn off was the low quality of the Realtors. The high end Realtors know what they are doing. But the vast majority have gone into RE because they were looking for the big buck upsizing in their personal lives.
I have encountered: Housewives who never worked, teachers who don’t teach, an architect, a couple of stay at home dads, college grads without jobs, family members of other Realtors, ex-cops, ex-lawyers, ex everything.
Only one of them knew the true differences in the 3 school systems here in La Jolla. None of them knew the school principal names. Virtually all of them were less informed then I was about the community – even though I have never lived here before. As salespeople they basically didn’t have ANY skills. It was embarrassing. But Prudential kept hiring them. Someone told me that there were 400 agents in Prudential La Jolla alone.
The fallout from the housing bubble will be dramatic. My sister lives in OC and lots of her friends are losing their jobs or have lost their jobs in the financial sector of mortgages, etc. My cousin is a Realtor up by Malibu – no sales – he lives next door to Countrywide’s headquarters. His house has been on the market for a year – he refuses to lower his price significantly because he wasn’t willing to give away his equity. He has a reverse amortization resetting mortgage and will soon be upside down. It gets worse….
I was in Home Depot – it was a ghost town… Seriously – Costco might have been an off day, and maybe everyone had already shopped for their parties, but Home Depot was a wreck. We will suffer large executive and middle level job losses in Construction, financing, etc. My broker told me that WaMu has spent so much money and has so many offices dedicated to sub-prime and that these offices will be closed and the people fired. My last comment is my friend in New Jersey works for a subprime lender that WaMu owns. He is switching jobs this month, his volume went down by 97% since last year – (he went from making Real Estate money to McDonalds money over the last year)… He and a legion of others will start putting this state into recession.