New Hampshire Real Estate & Consumer Resources

One of the things that most surprised me about my new career was how much money I was expected to shell out just to stay in the business. It’s wasn’t a situation where I was kept in the dark and then ambushed with demands for money. I was well informed about the various expenses involved, but I guess it really hit me when I saw the actual amounts involved and started to write checks.

We are not talking a fortune here, but it surely was more than I expect to be laying out to get my career off the ground.

Here are the expenses I had to cover to get my career started (and this comes after the $500 or so I laid out for the pre-exam class, study material and exam fee):

Real Estate Application Fee (State of New Hampshire): $70
Errors and Omissions Insurance (company required): $270
National Association of Realtors Membership (company required): $374
Multiple Listing Service (MLS) Access: $25
Board of Realtors Fees: $55.00

As you can see, I had to spend almost $1300 just to be able to call myself a real estate agent. If it is a career you are planning to start, make sure you have enough money in the bank to cover these costs. Also, you’ll need to cover all your normal living expenses until you start earning money from real estate, and that can take a while. If you are not involved in any transactions for a while, things can get a bit rough.

All the expenditures listed above (except those to do with licensing) are required on a yearly or quarterly basis, so it is a continuing process of writing checks for one membership or another. Eventually I was almost afraid to look in my mailbox each time I visited the office for fear of finding out that I had to shell out another few hundred dollars for some other membership or insurance I was required to have.

For agents that enjoy the work and earning a good income, these expenses are probably not much of a consideration and are well worth the associated costs. And since real estate agents are considered independent contractors in most cases, it is not terribly outside-the-norm to expect some start-up costs when one is esentially starting up a business.

There weren’t exactly mobs of people beating my door down or ringing my phone wanting to buy or sell a house, so seeing money that seemed to be traveling in the wrong direction in relation to my wallet was a little unsettling. That is probably not an uncommon experience for a new agent.

Having attended my first real estate licensing class in May and passed my exam in July. There were options available that could have made it all happen even faster, but I wanted to be able to really absorb the material and not feel rushed. I am not a “cram at the last minute” type of person at all.

I finished the company-provided real estate training in September and started to ease into the actual business of real estate when that was completed, so for me it took about 5 months to go from guy looking for a job to guy who could actually call himself a real estate agent.

There is some debate about whether more training should be required for real estate agents, and now that I am far removed from the situation, I would have to say more training should be required.

I did not feel ready to go out and start helping people buy or sell a home even after completing the company training program. I had excellent support from our office manager and the other agents could not have been better when it came to helping out a new agent, but even so, there seemed to be so much to know that I did not yet know, and I felt totally incapable of actually doing the job.

These feelings stayed with me for a long time — right up until I decided it was time for me to quit the business.

Coming Next: Why A Career In Real Estate Was Not For Me