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I know others have done it, for example, Ken, the founder of this site. How hard is it to go from law school to high end real estate agent. I'm currently a 3l at a t-20 school (top 50%) and have no job lined up and, rather than settle for something that I will be miserable doing, I would love to move into being a real estate agent. I know this career has become trendy lately (HGTV effect), but its something I believe I would truly enjoy.

Anyone have any advice on breaking into the industry and how valuable a law degree will be? Should I take the JD off my resume when applying?

I will be NYC and am interested in doing sales, not leasing crappy apartments to students.

Anonymous User wrote:I know others have done it, for example, Ken, the founder of this site. How hard is it to go from law school to high end real estate agent. I'm currently a 3l at a t-20 school (top 50%) and have no job lined up and, rather than settle for something that I will be miserable doing, I would love to move into being a real estate agent. I know this career has become trendy lately (HGTV effect), but its something I believe I would truly enjoy.

Anyone have any advice on breaking into the industry and how valuable a law degree will be? Should I take the JD off my resume when applying?

I will be NYC and am interested in doing sales, not leasing crappy apartments to students.

You don't walk into a good paying salaried high end real estate agent gig. You get paid well by selling properties and collecting commission off them. It's sales. So you can make a lot of money or not much at all. I don't think it's terribly difficult to get started, but again it's how well you can build a network and start getting listings to sell and get those commissions. Also, commercial is high payout but low volume and not very frequent paychecks and residential is high volume and more frequent lower paying commissions.

Edit: also, in some states I believe a law license substitutes for the classes you would otherwise have to take.

One more edit: it can take a couple years to start making good commissions to start a life off of. If you can get over that 2 year hump you will probably do alright. Be persistent in your struggle and don't give up if you go this route. It takes time for the money to start coming in. Good luck!

dude this was trendy like 6 years ago. market is way oversaturated for RE agents. it's a tough gig i know a bunch of people who left. you do have some advantage with a law license as someone mentioned, i think you can open up your own brokerage firm and have people work for u with a law license provided you have X years of experience. i forgot the exact regs, but most regular brokers can't just open up their own firm

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I worked as a RE agent during college summers. It is tough work, though the money was not bad even though I was not particularly good at it.
The good people at my firm made over $100k (our asshole boss---ps if you think biglaw bosses are bad, this guy was on a whole other level since he did not even know what he could not legally do to employees) would send a server email naming people that closed over 25k for the month.

Usually, commission is split, so the 25k people would take 12.5k home with the rest going to the firm. Anyway, it is not a terrible, terrible job, but it does make this whole law school process seem like a total waste of time/energy/money since you could have done this job in college.


If you go up the food chain though you can do well. You get part of the commissions of RE agents (that 12.5k that goes to the firm), you do sale and commercial properties (more lucrative), and you find out about properties before other people do. My manager had started purchasing properties when he saw a really good opportunity, and make money off of them on the side.

Finally, me experience was in a big east coast city.