The Walk Through, a very good real estate blog from the New York Times, points to a move by the California Association of Realtors to get tougher on the licensing requirements for Realtors.

You can read the full article over at the Sacramento Business Journal.

Our basic reason for being is that as house prices go up, so do the number of realtors. Almost exactly in unison. Where prices have gone up the most, so have the number of realtors in that area.

Anything to toughen the standards of accreditation is a great thing for home owners and a great thing for those fantastic realtors out there who help their clients achieve fantastic returns when selling and great bargains when buying.

This weekend’s edition of the New York Times promises to be a good one. 200 pages of real estate, according to cross-town rival The New York Observer.

Of particular interest to Homethinking users will be an article from the Freakonomics duo of Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, who also are doing a press tour on the topic of real estate agents. Be sure to check out the schedule of TV appearances.

One of our basic reasons for being is in reaction to the raw growth in the number of Realtors. There are two-thirds more realtors to choose from than there were in 2000.

Bob Hagerty of the Wall Street Journal had an excellent article today on this very trend.

You may think to yourself that becoming a Realtor is a relatively lucrative profession – if you could just sell a few of those million dollar homes you’d be doing very well. Even though you get paid a lot more money per house, because there are more realtors than ever you get paid about the same. Indeed slightly less than a few years ago according to the article:

“The median annual income of real-estate sales agents in 2004 was only $37,600, down from $39,300 in 2002, according to the Realtors.”

As for us, we’d like to help homeowners choose the best one in and among this increasingly noisy landscape.

Damon Darlin over at The Walk Through, the real estate blog of the New York Times, audits the predictions of the National Association of Realtors over the past few years in a fascinating post.

He finds that the forecasters tend to be on the negative side, each year forecasting a decline in real estate and each year being proven wrong with a rise in sales volume. In fact during the last few years their predictions of decline have differed by as much as 14% in reality.

Each year they have argued it is different and that this year sales will decline. But history keeps proving them wrong.

The housing bubble that never was?