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Real Estate Agents Can't Get No Satisfaction
 TMCnet Contributing Editor
CRM and analytics vendor Rexer Analytics reportedly has announced the results of its New England Real Estate Agent Survey showing “declining levels of sales and agent satisfaction during 2008.”
Many agents remain “guardedly optimistic,” the survey found, with over half projecting that the coming year will be the same or better than a typical year, and 90 percent of agents reporting that they plan to remain in the real estate field “for the foreseeable future.”
In April of 2008, Rexer assessed the experiences, priorities, and challenges of New England real estate agents through an online survey. In November, the agents who participated in the spring were asked a few follow-up questions about their experiences over the intervening six months and their current outlook.
For the April 2008 study, 211 agents from the six New England states participated in the survey. To qualify for the study, agents had to have at least two years experience in the field. Forty-four percent were in the field between two and six years, and 30 percent have 20 or more years of experience. Nearly half (47 percent) of those surveyed made $40,000/year or less in the previous year and just over a quarter (27 percent) made more than $80,000/year.
It’s this reporter’s opinion that real estate agents tend to be an optimistic group by nature, a trait borne out by the study: Despite over half (53 percent) experiencing their “worst year ever” or a “worse than average year,” less than a quarter (24 percent) projected the next year to fall into these categories.
Current market pressures may be keeping many agents from being “completely satisfied” (only 30 percent indicated this highest level of satisfaction), although most do tend toward being content, with an additional 47 percent being “satisfied.”
Okay: That was April.
About 160 of the participants in that study who provided their e-mail address so that the survey results could be sent to them were contacted again in November for a brief follow-up survey to determine how their last six months had been and to see how their outlook was in comparison to April.
Overall satisfaction dropped notably: in April 31 percent of these agents were “completely satisfied,” while in November only 13 percent were. Conversely, in April only seven percent of these agents were dissatisfied (indicated by selecting “dissatisfied” or “completely dissatisfied”) while in November this number rose to 24 percent.
Agents’ drop in satisfaction corresponded to their personal experiences becoming markedly worse over the intervening months, with 69 percent reporting that the past six months were worse than similar time periods in previous years (compared with 52 percent in April indicating this was the case for the previous year). While only 23 percent saw the coming year as likely to be a below average year in April, that figure rose to 43 percent in November.
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David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David's articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.
Edited by Michael Dinan
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