DALLAS – Christian Walker has been in residential sales only a few months, but he’s already catching on to the business.
“My first closing was within two months of starting in the business, and it went really well. And I am working with several new clients,” said Walker, who this year graduated from college with a degree in political science and business.
He decided the hot Dallas housing market was his ticket to a career.
“It’s a matter of networking and learning your market,” said Walker, who spent a year going to open houses and studying the home market before deciding to get into residential sales.
At 25, the fledgling Dallas real estate agent is less than half the age of the average U.S. Realtor.
With young generations of buyers coming up, Realtors are looking for ways to get younger people into the industry and attract younger clients.
“It’s real important,” said Ebby Halliday Realtors president Mary Frances Burleson. “Our clients want someone who understands things from their perspective.”
Burleson estimates that half of the agents in her firm’s latest training session were under 35. “We’re seeing a lot of young men coming into the business,” she said. The national work force is more than half female. “A lot of these people have better attitudes and don’t have pie-in-the-sky expectations.”
Stacie O’Gorman, 24, knew what to expect when she got into home sales last year. Her mother, Cindy, is a top producer for Ebby Halliday.
“I had worked for my mom for two summers,” she said. “My mom’s job is pretty stressful, and I wasn’t sure that I wanted to do it.
“But when I got out of college, I decided to try it and see if I liked it, and I do,” said O’Gorman, who caters mainly to buyers. “I’ve worked with some younger families, but most of my clients are older than I am.”
It’s important for residential sales companies to have a diverse group of agents, said David Griffin, whose small Dallas firm hired Walker.
“We have agents from their 20s through their 80s,” Griffin said. “There are so many different kinds of customers that you need different kinds of people.
“Sometimes young people like to work with grandmother types because they are more comfortable,” he said. “But young people communicate in ways older agents can only guess about sometimes.”
For more than a decade, residential sales firms have centered their business on the baby boom generation that has dominated the U.S. economy.
But real estate agents are now scoping out younger buyers who will make up the bulk of their future business.
“The lion’s share of the people in this room are baby boomers or veterans,” Maryland Realtor Gee Dunsten told hundreds of sales agents at a recent industry meeting in San Francisco. “Your challenge is going to be to change your focus.”
Dunsten suggested that real estate agents target so-called Generation X buyers, the more than 40 million Americans born between 1965 and 1980.
“We need to begin to change our strategies,” he said. “This group that has not gotten the publicity (that baby boomers have) is very, very quickly having a huge effect on us.
“They are beginning to have an effect on this country in leadership in business and education,” Dunsten said.
Likewise, other agents are sizing up the generation of buyers that is just now entering its 20s.
These “echo boom” buyers were born between 1981 and 1995, said Seattle real estate agent J. Lennox Scott.
“In five years, they are going to be streaming into the first-time home buying market,” Scott said. “There are 75 million of them.
“We are going to have a big base with the echo boom generation kids coming on board,” he said.
Finding affordable housing for the young buyers will be a challenge, agents agree.
“Some of these people arrive in the housing market, and they want mansions at an entry-level prices,” Dunsten said.
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