You just might find your next job lurking behind a For Sale sign. The latest residential real estate boom, which began three years ago and shows no sign of ebbing, has created a demand for workers to fill hundreds of lucrative jobs, including some in “hidden” fields you may know nothing about.
According to Jay Huffman, chairman of the board of the Multiple Listing Service of Northern Illinois Inc., in Lisle, 280,342 single-family homes in the Chicago metropolitan area changed hands since June 1995. Thousands of real estate agents, who earn as much as a 6 percent commission on each sale, are prospering, and the busiest are reaping annual commissions of $500,000 and more.
But not everyone making money off the boom is selling houses:
– Closers, the agents who conduct real estate closings for title insurance companies, can earn up to $75 a closing, and may have as many as 10 closings a day;
– Some local real estate appraisal offices are so busy they’re willing to start appraiser trainees at $25,000;
– Home inspectors, the people who ensure that the homes involved in those real estate transactions all come with working furnaces and solid roofs and without major problems for the buyers, are earning up to $80,000 a year.
Should you leave your job and cash in on the boom? Perhaps, but not without first understanding a few things about the real estate business.
Real estate is cyclical. “It’s unusual for us to have all three factors–low interest rates, full employment and high consumer confidence–in sync at the same time,” says Doug Ayers, president of Coldwell Banker’s residential brokerage business in Des Plaines.
In the 1970s, high interest rates hurt home sales; in the 1980s, when corporations started downsizing, consumer confidence dropped, too. Although Ayers and other experts expect the current boom to last a while longer, no one is predicting that it will last forever.
Real estate is a pay-your-dues profession and no one starts out making good money. Most real estate salespeople earn on average less than $24,000 annually in their first few years, according to the National Association of Realtors (NAR) 1997 annual compensation study. Appraisers and home inspectors must learn by observing, and often spend a year or more apprenticed to professionals before working on their own. Title insurance companies have their own internal pecking orders of jobs below the lucrative closer level.
Real estate is never 9-to-5 and seldom Monday through Friday. People shop for homes when they’re not working themselves, which means that the busiest times for real estate brokers are weekends and evenings. Home inspectors must be on call to answer questions. And closers must arrange those closings at the convenience of the parties involved, even if that means getting everyone together at 7 a.m.
That said, working in residential real estate has advantages in that most of these jobs are skills-based and do not require a college education. Also, many of these jobs lend themselves to part-time work.
But before you decide to drop everything, read through the skills and personality traits required for each job.
Home inspectors
Home buyers hire home inspectors to check out the condition of a home before agreeing to purchase it.
Although the field is not licensed in Illinois and has no official entrance requirements, most current inspectors have backgrounds in engineering, construction, or architecture, or have worked in one of the building trades–as an electrician or plumber, for example. If you have knowledge of one of these fields, you can learn the techniques of home inspection from one of the 16 ASHI-approved schools in the U.S. and Canada. Courses cost from $595 to $5,000 and often include, for an additional fee, the option of an apprenticeship program.
Home buyers pay an average of $300 for each inspection. An experienced inspector can earn $30,000 to $80,000 a year, says Nancy Gibbs, the office manager of Home Buyers Inspection Service in Naperville.
For more information, contact the American Society of Home Inspectors (ASHI) at 800-743-2744.
Appraisers
The state’s 4,310 real estate appraisers are the safety checks on every real estate loan. Before a bank or other lending institution writes a mortgage on a house or condo, they send out an appraiser who provides an independent opinion of the home’s market value by performing a physical inspection of the property–measuring its rooms, checking out the neighborhood, and comparing the home’s selling price or mortgage refinance amount against the selling prices of comparable houses in the area.
To become an appraiser, you don’t need a college degree. You do need math and analytical skills, the ability to write clear reports, a flair for communicating, some computer expertise and, according to newly licensed appraiser Theresa Delphonse of Chicago, a real interest in seeing other people’s homes and neighborhoods.
Appraisal fees, which average $250 per home, are paid by the buyer as part of a deal’s closing costs. A beginning appraiser will earn $20,000 to $30,000 a year; an experienced residential real estate appraiser can earn $40,000 or more.
In Illinois, appraisers must complete 90 hours of approved courses and pass an exam to be licensed by the real estate appraisal division of the state’s Office of Banks and Real Estate in Springfield. (Call 217-524-8200 for information.)
You can also call the Appraisal Institute in Chicago, at 312-335-4473, and ask for brochures on the appraisal process or check out the trade group’s Web site at (appraisalinstitute.org) or the state office’s site at (state.il.us/obr).
Title insurance
Title insurance companies are the invisible agents behind every real estate deal. Before a house is sold, someone from one of the state’s 4,000 title insurance firms must search through county records to prove that the person selling a piece of property is really its owner and that no tax liens or other judgments exist against it. The title insurance company then writes an insurance policy guaranteeing that the title is clear, and acts as a neutral third party, holding and distributing the monies involved.
“The work involves a lot of complicated details,” says Richard Perkins, vice president of operations for Investors Title Guarantee Inc., in Chicago.
Title insurance companies look for high school graduates with good math skills and put them through extensive in-house training. According to Perkins, most workers start out as title searchers, at salaries of about $25,000, then work their way up to title examiners, at salaries of about $30,000 to $40,000, or closers, who can earn $60 to $75 per closing, or up to $70,000 a year.
For more information, contact the American Land Title Association in Washington, D.C., at 800 787-ALTA.
Real estate agents
At the center of almost every real estate transaction are the agents who represent the buyer and the seller. Real estate agents earn no salaries and make their money from commissions paid by the sellers, which average 6 percent of the sale price.
A top agent, like Andee Hausman, a sales associate with ReMax Experts in Buffalo Grove, who sold $30 million worth of houses last year, can earn almost half a million dollars in a single year, her cut of commissions split among her company and others involved in the sale.
But according to the NAR survey, the country’s typical real estate agent is a 52-year-old female working full time in real estate, with nine years’ experience and earning $44,800.
If you feel motivated enough, call the real estate division of the Illinois Office of Banks and Real Estate in Springfield, at 217-785-9300, and ask for the list of approved real estate schools. To be a real estate salesperson, you must complete 30 hours of classes and pass a computerized exam. Salespeople must work under real estate brokers for at least a year. To become a broker, you must take an additional 60 hours of instruction and pass another test.
For more information, check out the state’s real estate division Web site at (state.il.us/obr) or contact the Illinois Association of Realtors at 217-529-2600 or visit the Web site at (illinoisrealtor.org).
