“I didn’t realize the issues with the real estate market until I was signing with a brokerage,” she said. “It wasn’t until I was in the field that I thought, ‘I missed the mark.’”
Powell said potential buyers have been telling her they don’t want to go through an agent, not realizing the amount of work she puts into a transaction. Despite her concerns, Powell maintains that the market is cyclical and is pushing to build up her practice.
Older agents have been through troughs before. And in part, age is what’s making the latest market downdrift difficult for younger real estate professionals. According to the National Association of Realtors, the typical member is “a 60-year-old white female who attended college and is a homeowner.” More broadly, people tend to think of real estate agents as older than twenty-something. And some buyers have a difficult time entrusting what is often the largest financial transaction of their life with a relative newcomer.
“When people see me, they think I’m 17 or 18,” said Amber Perkins, a 27-year-old agent in Los Angeles who is just on the cusp of the Gen Z age cutoff. “I’ve had people in my comment section say, ‘She’s young and inexperienced, she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.’”
Catch-22
Perkins and her peers are grappling with a Catch-22 of early career real estate: You need deals to get experience, but you only get deals with experience. That’s especially hard in a market that abruptly turned down from historic highs that is now offering few transactions.
To deal with it, Perkins said she leans into her strengths as a digital native and pushes hard on social media. That's where she gets most of her leads anyways.
“I’m young,” she said. “But I’m confident in my abilities and what I can do to get deals done.”
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.