“Do I think we will see a drop in the future?” said NEFAR’s Glenn East. “Yes, I still think we have a little drop coming. Is it going to be dramatic? No, but I think we will see another drop at the end of the year unless the economy turns around.
“The pipelines to our industry are the real estate schools. Those pipelines are not nearly as strong as they were.”
East said people are not scrambling to get into the real estate business anymore, so the pipeline has dried up some.
“That’s going to have an effect on us down the road,” said East. “We have normal attrition in this business every year, but when the pipeline dries up it doesn’t give us the ability to replace those that normally attrition out at the end of the year. So, we will probably see another slight drop at the end of this year.”
The local real estate schools are feeling the pinch as well.
“The latest monthly figures that I have for people taking their real estate exam show that first-time takers for the sales associate were 908 students in June of 2008,” said Bill Barfield, instructional program manager for the Real Estate Academy of Florida Community College of Jacksonville. “If you go back to March of 2007, we had 2,168. I use first-time exam takers as my comparison for what is happening in the market. In talking to other schools, people taking the initial sales associate course are down dramatically.”
NEFAR was holding two New Member Orientation classes a month during the peak, but is now back to its normal once-a-month class. They may have 60-80 the number of people in each session, down from the 120 or more in the peak days.
Walters Williams, owner of Coldwell Banker Walter Williams, said he started to see an improvement in the market in April of this year and has continued to see an improvement since then, but big changes are coming.
“We are having a decent month so far this month,” said Williams. “The business is changing. It’s changing because of the Internet. It’s changing because of the X, Y and baby boomer generation. I don’t think any of us know where it’s going right now until we work sort of work through this and see the demographics and see the things that are involved.
“The gas prices are going to have an effect. People are going to want to be closer in to where they work. This transportation cost thing is going to have an effect. All of those things are having an effect on our market and are going to make some pretty big changes in our market and what we do and how we address it in the next three to five years.”
— Michele Newbern Gillis