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It's very hard to check out the reputation of real estate brokers. Neither personal recommendations nor years of experience fully do the job (although both are
by tokenadult 14y ago
It's very hard to check out the reputation of real estate brokers. Neither personal recommendations nor years of experience fully do the job (although both are useful at the margins). More than forty years ago, I was in school with a boy who was, I discovered, a pathological liar. He would make up elaborate stories to play practical jokes on classmates. About a decade ago, I was startled to see his name (very unusual) and face (three decades after I had last seen it) on a billboard in town. You know what occupation he pursues now. He seemed to have some visibility in our town as a successful business person during the height of the real estate bubble. He is still in the same line of work (but now just with lawn signs, not billboards) after the bubble popped. I wonder how any person shopping for a real estate broker could distinguish brokers like him from any other kind of broker.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- jonknee 14y agoHe may have turned into a great real estate broker...
- psaintla 14y agoThere is a reason for that, real estate is an extremely high turnover occupation with an extremely low barrier to entry. I know this because when I was 18 (a very long time ago :-) ) I wrote and eventually sold the rights to real estate inventory and CRM software to a small real estate company in NY to pay for my college education. Before I wrote the software I wanted to gain domain knowledge in the industry so that I could write an application that actually met the needs of the real estate industry and also so that people would take me seriously as a "kid". So I went to get my real estate brokers license which required I take a course that was a few hours, a course exam and then a state exam. It took less than two weeks for me to be qualified to help people make the biggest financial decision of their life and I learned much less from the course than I did from a few books I picked up from the bookstore.