One of the strange byproducts of the rise in housing pricing in the last 5-10 years has been the explosion of employment in the real estate industry. Indeed, the NAR, the official body, says that its membership has risen from three quarters of a million in 2000 to 1.3 million last year. But are all of those agents working? How disproportionate is the workload?

We decided to explore that question and more, using Hawaii as our test bed of data. There are around 10,000 agents in Hawaii. And at the moment, there are roughly 6,500 properties for sale across the four islands. And over the month of September and the first few weeks of October, around 9,242 properties came on the market, according to our estimates.

So rather neatly, every Realtor is representing roughly one home. Sound like an easy job? One to one service at its best?

The averages hide the truth because so many agents are not active. In fact, after monitoring the marketplace over the month of September and the first few weeks of October we can see that just 1,354 Realtors are selling properties. Which means that 8,791 are not, or roughly 87% of the Realtors in Hawaii!

The 1,354 active agents represent about seven properties, on average, at any one time. Just 72 agents have more than 15 properties on the market, suggesting that all of these 1,354 agents work with a roughly similar load before the customer service starts to be pressured by too many listings.

The make up of the real estate market place was the very reason we began Homethinking. To us, using a Realtor was never an ‘if’ question but always a ‘who’ one. Data like the above continues to prove that theory. And also the reason why we are trying our best to point Hawaii home owners to at least the 1,354 who are active and hopefully the best 10-20 in their particular area.