Question: I’m cheating a bit here and answering my own question this week. I come across so many agents representing buyers and sellers who I don’t recognize that I wanted to know just how many agents have handled a real estate transaction in Arlington over the last couple of years. So Eli, how many real estate agents are there operating in Arlington?
Answer: Like it or not, the residential real estate profession has one of the lowest barriers to entry of any industry. While there are a lot of great agents out there, dedicated to their profession and delivering real value to their clients, it’s easy for just about anybody with a couple of months to study and a few hundred dollars to represent you in a real estate transaction.
That’s why it’s important to ask your agent if they’re full-time or part-time, how much business they do, and about their professional background.
A Lot Of Agents
To answer my question, I pulled data on the last 5,000 transactions (totaling $3.2 billion in just under two years) in Arlington to find out how many agents were involved.
Remember that in each transaction there are usually two agents and for the sake of simplicity, if an agent represented both sides of a deal, they’re credited with two sales in these figures. Here’s a summary of what I found:
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There were 3,139 total agents who worked on the last 5,000 transactions, with 2,287 different buyers agents and 1,904 different listing agents
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178, or 5.7 percent, of those agents closed ten or more of those deals
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The 2,218 agents who closed one or two deals accounted for over $1.6 billion in sales or about 25 percent of sales volume (the $1.6B has to be divided by twice the $3.2 billion sales volume in Arlington to account for one agent on each side of the deal)
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The top 1 percent of agents by total transactions accounted for just over $1 billion in sales or about 16 percent of sales volume
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Only one agent represented over 100 buyers or 100 sellers (and you’ve probably seen her face on buses around the county)
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Out of the agents who closed five or more deals, 46 of them averaged over $1 million per sale
Some Exceptions
Just because somebody has only done one or two deals in Arlington doesn’t mean they’re not a great agent, in fact, I see a number of solid agents on this list who I know from other markets in the D.C. metropolitan area. There’s also quite a few agents in the industry who transact simply for their own investments.
What Do You Think?
Given this information and the data points above, are you surprised at the number of agents operating in Arlington? Do you think having a low barrier to entry and minimal license maintenance requirements/costs is a good thing for the residential real estate industry or should it be more difficult and more expensive to operate as a licensed agent so that fewer agents are managing Arlington’s real estate market? Discuss!
