A Realtor For Every Child
Know someone’s friend’s son who is in real estate? Chances are you probably do. During the steep appreciation of home prices in the past decade, more than a few people have decided to join the real estate industry. In fact, in Miami there is currently around one realtor for every seventeen people.
To investigate just how crowded the market has become, we took CNN’s rank of the 25 most pricey cities to live in and ran that against our data on roughly 1.5m real estate agents to see what cities had the highest ratio of real estate agents per person (as defined by someone who bases themselves in that city or has managed a recent listing/sale there). Here’s what we came up with:
| Rank | City, State | Median Price | People/Agent |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rank | City, State | Median Price | People/Agent |
| 1 | Newport Beach, CA | $1,362,500 | 45 |
| 2 | Greenwich, CT | $1,129,000 | 73 |
| 3 | Santa Barbara, CA | $979,500 | 67 |
| 4 | Palo Alto, CA | $929,000 | 94 |
| 5 | Cupertino, CA | $880,000 | 59 |
| 6 | Goleta, CA | $870,000 | 691 |
| 7 | San Clemente, CA | $848,500 | 46 |
| 8 | Bethesda, MD | $790,000 | 37 |
| 9 | Pleasanton, CA | $785,000 | 50 |
| 10 | Santa Monica, CA | $784,000 | 92 |
| 11 | Redondo Beach, CA | $777,500 | 75 |
| 12 | Redwood City, CA | $767,500 | 130 |
| 13 | San Francisco, CA | $755,000 | 164 |
| 14 | Yorba Linda, CA | $750,000 | 54 |
| 15 | San Rafael, CA | $745,000 | 72 |
| 16 | Encinitas, CA | $742,500 | 85 |
| 17 | San Ramon, CA | $725,000 | 63 |
| 18 | San Mateo, CA | $720,000 | 98 |
| 19 | Arcadia, CA | $703,000 | 37 |
| 20 | Santa Cruz, CA | $690,000 | 79 |
| 21 | South San Francisco, CA | $690,000 | 451 |
| 22 | Berkeley, CA | $683,500 | 161 |
| 23 | Alameda, CA | $682,500 | 161 |
| 24 | Carlsbad, CA | $680,000 | 53 |
| 25 | Huntington Beach, CA | $678,500 | 75 |
Over time the number of agents has tended to follow home prices. So if home prices continue to appreciate, perhaps the marketing industry nirvanna of one to one marketing really will, quite literally, be realized in certain cities over the decades - if not in the form of what the inventors had originally envisioned!
[…] Niki Scevak at the Homethinking Blog posted some interesting data about the ratio of real estate agents per person in some pricey markets. The post is titled: A Realtor For Every Child. […]
Carnival of Real Estate Blogs » Pine Needle Lawn
21 Aug 06 at 9:33 am
Ha! Great post!
Would love to correlate this down to the zip code level and then test to see the impact on inventory, list:sales price ratios, price appreciation, etc.
Could be very telling stuff!
mike simonsen
21 Aug 06 at 12:12 pm
I manage a real estate frim in Boulder, CO. Our median price is in the high $500s, and I beleive we have about 1200 realtors on the Boulder Board and a general population of about 100,000 (including 20k or so students at the Univeristy of Colorado). As a professional in the business it is disheartening to new comers and part timers. I am struck at the decision criteria that some buyers or sellers use to choose an agent for the single largest transaction most of them will ever be involved in….
Just because your friend’s sister’s brother-in-law got his real estate licence last month doesn’t necessarily mean he’s qualified to negotiate your deal and/or mercilessly protect your interests.
Choose a professional with a good education - not real estate school or some hokey certification from the local board - but someone who knows how to negotiate and isn’t afraid to go rough somebody up to save you or get you more money.
Martin Anderson
23 Aug 06 at 12:14 am
WaterwayRealty.com
We do have a very high ratio of Real Estate Agents to Population. Good nes is that most are “just licensed” and not actually full time agents. Bad news, .. most people use a “family” member when transacting business.
Mott Marvin Kornicki
17 May 07 at 8:37 pm