How Much New Real Estate Agents Actually Make ($8,000)

$8,100 a year. Not $81,000. $8,100 a year. That is the median annual income for real estate agents in their first 2 years in the business. And I want you to hear that word, median, not even average. Means half of the real estate agents in their first years make less than $8,100 a year. Now, that didn't come from some fearmongering social media post. That came directly from the National Association of Realtors, your own trade association, who is supposed to help you learn how to make more money. Now, they published it 3 weeks ago, June 2026, and I'm putting the link to the actual report in the description of this video because there's so many BS stats that are going around right now on social media trying to scare real estate agents and all that kind of stuff. But I want you to go read it for yourself. And here's the worst part of it, the part that nobody wants to say out loud. In that same report, they said the typical realtor spends about $9,500 a year in business expenses. Okay, mileage, marketing, dues, tech, software, all of it. Okay, now those are two different numbers measured two different ways. One's typical or average, the other's median. But just look at the shape of it. Okay, the shape of it is this: the median agent in the first two years is running their business at a loss. This is not like a part-time gig where you make a little money. They're making no money. They're spending more money than they are making. And I'm not telling you this to depress you. Okay, I'm telling you this because I know exactly why it's happening, and it's not the market, it's not your talent, it's not that you're not working hard enough. Most of you are working plenty hard, you're exhausted and you're broke, and now you're discouraged on top of all that. That's the tell. So today I'm going to give you 3 secrets to help you get out of that trap of not making money and how to start making consistently and predictably every single month. And we'll talk about the actual number that you have to hit or none of this works. And I'll tell you this right now, at the end I'm going to invite you to a free masterclass that I'm going to do where I walk you through building this whole thing step by step. The link's going to be in the description. Go grab it now if you want, but stay with me here because secret number 1 is probably going to piss you off. Okay, now let me tell you where I come from on all this. So when I got into real estate, I didn't know anybody. I had moved from a little town in North Texas, Vernon, to Dallas-Fort Worth. I had no money, I had no marketing, practically had no sphere of influence to call. And so I'm starting with absolutely zero. And everybody around me is telling me to same thing, do open houses and work with buyers because buyers are easier. And they are. And that's the trap. The one voice against that was my broker, Mike Bowman, who said listings are the name of the game. Okay. And I took that to heart because here's the thing, here's what a buyer actually is. A buyer is one transaction. You drive them around for 3 months, you show them 30 houses, you write 4 offers, you lose 3, and if you're lucky, you close 1 and then you're done and you're back at zero again. And so now you got to go find another one and then another one and then another one, one at a time. And that, my friend, is not a business. That is a job with worse hours and no paycheck most of the time. And so I made a different decision. I decided that I was going to master the listing game. I wasn't going to dabble in it. I was going to master it. In my third year of my business, I took 92 listings in one year. Now, I want to be clear about what I actually did, because it wasn't just about the commission checks. When you take a listing, you just hired all the other agents in the market to work for you 7 days a week. Every agent in your market is now out there trying to sell your listing for you. You get a free billboard in the neighborhood. You get buyers who are calling you off the sign or off the property listing. And when it sells fast, like it should, Every neighbor on that street knows exactly who you are because that sign for sell sign put a sold sign on it in 10 days or a week and everybody knows. And that one listing— and here's the secret— one listing didn't give me one deal. See, one listing generated for me the next listing, and that's the leverage. And it's that leverage is the entire difference between making $8,100 $100,000 a year with nearly $10,000 of business expenses and having a real income that makes your business profitable. Okay, so let me show you the 3 secrets. Okay. Secret number 1 is you don't have a lead problem. You have a zero and zero problem. Okay. Now, this is the number that nobody has noticed in that report from NAR, and it's a whole ballgame. So NAR, and they do this every year, they break everything down on how much of an agent's business, where it comes from and how much of it comes from these different sources. And here's the crazy thing. That most agents' business comes from repeat and referrals. Okay, repeat and referrals. Now, right now, I know there's a ton of marketing real estate gurus out there who are telling you, don't go after your past clients, don't talk to your friends and family, that's so cringe, you sound desperate and all this, which is total BS. Because when you actually look at the statistics, agents with 16 or more years in the business, 49% of their business is repeat business, repeat clients, and 32% comes from referrals. Now here's the problem. What about agents with 2 years or less experience? 0% repeat business, 0% referral business. Zero and zero. And that's the real problem. Where most seasoned agents get most of their business, you're not getting because you're new. So I just want you to sit with this for a second because it means that for new agents, the problem is not they can't get a deal. They got deals. The median was 2 transactions, 2 closings. And the problem is that when those 2 deals closed, nothing else happened. There's no referral that came out of it, no repeat that come out of it, no next listing that came out of it. The deal closed and the agent went right back to zero. Every single deal, you're starting over from scratch. And so when you're laying awake at night in the middle of the night, just going like, ah, where do I get my next deal? Where's my next deal coming from? I need a deal. I need more leads. No. You don't really need more leads. You need a business where the deal that you already did is producing for you the next one. Okay? Now I know some of you are already typing in the comments, Kevin, that's, that number's low because a lot of these agents, these new agents in their first 2 years are part-time agents. And you're right, a lot of them are. But listen, listen to what you just said. You just told me that the model is so weak that most of the people who try it can't afford afford to even do it full-time. That's not a defense of the business. It's not a defense of the statistic. It's the indictment. Because if this worked and if the average agent could come in new and make a real living out of it, you wouldn't have part-time agents, right? People don't get into real estate going like, I want to be part-time, I just don't want to have to work all the time. I mean, maybe they do, but that's not realistic. But what happens is they can't afford to go full-time, so they have to have a second job and another source of income just to be able to pay the bills and hope that someday they'll break through and it will be profitable. So, and here's one more thing from that same report. 62% of realtors get none of their business from in-person open houses. None. Zero. That was the very thing that they told us as new agents that we were supposed to do every single weekend was go out there and do open houses. Sit open houses and they're like, and yet nearly two-thirds of agents say, I get zero deals from doing open houses. That's not a hustle problem. Okay. It's a model. Problem. It's the business model. See, this is the problem. Secret number 1 is the number game. Secret number 2 is that listings are what turn the cascade on. Listings are what lets you get deal after deal after deal after deal. So what's actually broken? In what I call the Real Estate Vortex, the business model that I teach, there are 5 stages. There's connect. That's where you meet somebody, have a conversation with them. There's conversion. That's where you build credibility and trust. There's commitment. That's when you get them to commit to work exclusively with you to sign the listing agreement or sign the buyer broker agreement. There's completion, which is actually delivering the results and getting the house sold, which is when you get paid. And then there is the cascade. And the cascade is the magic. It's where every deal that you complete produces the next deal. That's where it creates the cascade effect. It creates referrals, reviews, testimonials, repeat business, and every closing feeds the next closing. Now go look at the NAR numbers one more time. Okay. Again, the links are in the description. 0% repeat and 0% referral business for new agents in their first 2 years, typically. So the typical agent has no cascade. It doesn't even exist for them. It's not even a possible. And so you're living in connection, trying to connect with new people, grinding for leads forever. And they never build the one thing that makes a business compound. And that's why they make $8,100 a year, not because they're lazy. But because they built a business with no engine to it, they're pushing the car, just chasing, grinding, trying to find the next lead. So how do you turn the cascade on? Here's how you turn it on. Listings. Listings are the name of the game. And here's why. A buyer deal is private, meaning it happens in your car. Nobody in the neighborhood knows that you did it. It produces you nothing but one transaction, one commission check. A listing is public. The sign goes in the yard, the neighbors see it, the mailers go out, it goes out on the internet from the MLS through the IDX feed to thousands and thousands of real estate websites. The open house event brings the whole block through the front door, and then a sold sign goes up, and that sold sign is a victory flag that tells 200 homeowners in the neighborhood exactly who to call when they want to sell their house. And that is the difference between a business that compounds and a business that resets as zero after every closing. So buyers are linear. It's just one and done. Listings compound. Buyers are one and done. Listings compound because they lead to more deals. So this is secret number 3, and this is what you got to get. It's a model problem, not a market problem. The reason agents are making $8,100 a year is not because of the market. It's because their business model and the magic number is 70%. Now here's where I'm going to lose some of you, and I'm okay with that, but Right now, somebody's watching this going like, Kevin, you don't understand my market. My market is different. No, I understand your market fine. And here's the standard I hold for myself and for my coaching members. And I want you to write it down. 70% or more of your business, 70% or more of your deals should be listings sold. Not 50/50, not 30% listings and 70% buyers. If you are under that number right now, if you're under 70% listings taken, you don't have a market problem. You Don't have a talent problem. You have a business model problem. And what I want you to hear is this is actually good news. Okay? It's the best news in this whole video. And that is that having a business model problem is fixable this week. You can't fix the market. You can't fix interest rates, right? You can't fix buyers not buying. You can't fix the inventory, but you can change your business model and you can start changing it this week. Okay. The 6-figure agent in your market is not there because they're smarter than you. They're not in a better market than you. Half of them are not even working as hard as you. They built a different machine. They generate seller leads on purpose with a system and they lead the seller to yes. And then they sell the house, they sell it fast, and then they leverage that one sale into the next one. The sphere of influence, the sale, the testimonials and reviews they get. Okay. And leveraging the other people that came to the house through open house events and from calls and so forth. One transaction becomes 2, 3, 4, or 5 transactions, not by luck, but by design. That's the cascade. That, my friend, is the real estate vortex. Okay. $8,100 a year is what happens when you chase buyers and chase transactions. One at a time. Okay. Six figures and sometimes even seven figures is what happens when you build a vortex. So here's what I want you to do right now. If you're sitting there and you know that you're closer to that $8,000 a year number than you want to admit, this is not time to beat yourself up and say, well, see, it's hard and the market's hard. Right now it's time to stop and realize you're not broken. Your business model is broken and you can fix a broken business model. I'm hosting a free masterclass where I wanna walk you through exactly how to build a listing-based business with the Listing Domination Blueprint, how to generate seller leads in your community and how to lead a seller to yes, the actual words, the strategies and everything, and how to turn one listing into 2, 3, 4, or 5 deals so your business finally starts to compound instead of having to reset at zero every time. So right now it's free masterclass. It's live. Go to yesmasters.com/listings. Yesmasters.com/listings. The link is in the description and register right now. Again, the link's in the description. It's pinned in the comments, but do it before anything else right now, before you click to the next video right now, because I don't want you to forget about it. And I want you to join me for that free training because it will turn the game around for you. Now, also in the comments right now, I want you just to Tell me, how much did you make your first year in the business? Just be honest about it. Okay, a round number is fine, but I want to see it. I want to see because I want every agent who lands on this video to know that they're not alone. And if you struggled your first year, if you're in your first year and struggling, that does not have to stay that way. And if you're here for the first time, make sure you subscribe to the channel because I make these videos for the agents who refuse to stay broke and are committed to winning. Listen to me, you are not an $8,000 a year agent. You just haven't built the machine yet. So join me for the free masterclass and let's go build it.