real estate agent salary
How Much Sacramento Agents Earn
A real estate agent’s salary, how much Sacramento agents earn in a year, can be a staggering amount of money or just enough to squeak by, and there doesn’t seem to be as much in the middle as you might think. Of course, there will always be those envious individuals who think agents make too much money for what we do, but those people don’t work in real estate and have little idea of what’s involved in the business. Rarely, though, do I meet a person who is concerned that I might not make enough money or end up with no commission on a transaction, and worries out loud about it like a client I met with last night in Midtown.
She was concerned it might take me 6 months or longer to sell her home in Midtown. Maybe it will. It’s a unique property. Maybe it won’t. It will take as long as it takes to find the right buyer. I promised to create a customized marketing plan for this seller. She didn’t want to me to spend a lot of time working on selling her home in Midtown and not get paid. You’ve got to adore people like this, even if that sort of thought process is unnecessary.
The thing is I don’t think about how much about how much money I earn. It is not my focus. Some wise person once said if you focus on your passion, the money will come. It is true. I love my job and don’t really envision my tasks and duties as work, per se. It’s just something I am driven to do. Attack my income, though, try to tell me I should cut my commission, and daggers fly. With precision. A person does not try to tell me I am not worth what I charge and still work with me. I run into people from time to time who want to cut off their noses to spite their faces. They are not my client base. They don’t know what they don’t know.
But I rarely run into a client who worries about how much Sacramento agents earn, concerned that we don’t make enough or won’t make any money. I explained to the seller in Midtown in part how I have been working on selling a home in Elk Grove now for almost a year and a half. Went into escrow yesterday. I don’t give up. Hey, I used to sell a lot of short sales, more than any other agent in a 7-county area over the last 10 years. Because I don’t focus on the money. I focus on my sellers. I make my sellers happy because of my job performance. The home in Elk Grove had issues that needed to be resolved, and some of those issues required time to pass. I stuck with it because I made a commitment.
They all eventually close. Maybe not tomorrow. Maybe not next month. But they will close. Every sale is unique. I’ve heard of agents who drop sellers and cancel listings because it involves too much work or they become disillusioned. They no longer believe in the process. Those agents are idiots.
I never worry about much Sacramento agents earn or my personal income. Depending on market conditions, my annual income can fluctuate. It never falls flat. I’m too busy selling Sacramento real estate. I can sell some homes in a week and another house could take a year or more of concentrated effort. It makes no difference to me.
Is a Sacramento Real Estate Agent Worth the Money?
If you’re thinking about going into real estate because you want to make a lot of money for doing little work, you can figure on joining the 80% of real estate agents in Sacramento who don’t make enough money from the business to adequately support a ferret. This is not to say there aren’t Sacramento real estate agents who can’t even change out a light bulb who make money but they are not in the majority. Most of the agents who make a lot of money work very hard for it and have survived this grueling business.
I received an email this morning from a woman in Wisconsin who was very upset that she had to pay a commission to an agent, even though she agreed to pay it. Is a Sacramento real estate agent worth the money? She didn’t think so. She had read my article about How Much Do Real Estate Agents Make? She didn’t believe it was fair that she pay “6% on an $800,000 home,” which she also further stated had amounted to $60,000, so you can see she struggles a bit with math.
Apparently, she had hired an agent last year who had agreed to negotiate his commissions, whatever that meant. In my book, once you sign a listing agreement, you’ve pretty much agreed to the commission, but maybe they do things differently in cheesehead territory — which I can say because I’m from Minnesota and we are allowed to poke fun at those from Wisconsin, neener, neener. Regardless, this agent who would “negotiate” could not sell her home. So much for that agent.
Fast forward to this year, and she signed a one-party show agreement of sorts, I suspect. The agent showed up, brought a buyer, brought an offer and now they are about to go into contract. Is this woman overjoyed that her home finally sold at a price she was willing to sell? Hardly. The writer believes it is “offensive” and it is “insane” to pay an agent that sum of money. She wants to know how she can wiggle out of that obligation. For her, the question of is a Sacraemento real estate agent worth the money her entire issue.
This is a woman I can picture thinking about a career in real estate. The lucrative real estate business probably seems so simple and easy to her. She doesn’t see the years of struggling to pay the dues and learning the business. She imagines big stacks of gold hidden in the basement. In the overall scheme of things, agents tend to get paid exactly what they are worth.
I can’t say I’ve ever, in all of my 40 years in the real estate business, had a seller tell me I made too much money. I’ve had sellers give me gift cards as a bonus after closing, in one case recently, $500 extra, because they felt I wasn’t paid enough as a full-service agent. Nobody has ever asked is a Sacramento real estate agent worth the money when they hired me.