Hello! friends

I have got PR and landing soon to Toronto. I am programmer by profession but i am very much interested to be real estate agent due to high income potential.

Please provide me information as to how can i be real estate agent, do i have to do training course or work under some agent first ... etc.

I shall be thankful to you all.

suresh

Hmm... why do u want to switch to real estate agent from s/w field? For a transaction, you will get 5% commission, which will be split with the other agent... so you make 2.5%... As a new agent, 50% of that may go to your agency... so you get 1.25%.

Looking at this link http://www.canadiandesi.ca/read.php?TID=19264&page=1 , If you look at an average 376K transaction, then you need to make 13 sales a year to match a 60K software job income. If you count advertising fee, gas cost (for all the showings??) etc., you may have to look at 15 sales or so, which is more than 1 sale per month.

Per the same post, average sale is 4646 (in Dec) and with more than 5000 agents around in GTA, that will be less an 1 sale per month! Considering a standard Poisson distribution, as a new agent, you may be lucky to make a sale in 2-3 months (at least to start with).

So, the question is, is it really worth for you to shift the career for economic reasons. If you have a passion for the realtor business, then, that is a different deal. You may need to consider the odd hours you will need to work as well as most showings may be during evenings and weekends.

I hope I am not offending any realtors here in the board :-) Sorry, if I did.

Btw, I am not a realtor... I am in the s/w field myself and one of my friends (s/w) wanted to get into realtor business. He did not quit, but got his wife get the certification and is now a Re/Max agent. Last year she made just one transaction (To be fair to her, she was never interested in this and took it up on my friend's insistance alone)