What Being a Real Estate Agent Is Actually Like

When people find out you're a real estate agent, what do they assume?

That I drive around in a nice car showing pretty houses and then collect a big check. That's the version people see on Instagram. The reality is that maybe 15% of my time is spent showing homes. The rest is lead generation, follow-up, paperwork, negotiation, putting out fires, and sitting in my car in a Publix parking lot eating a granola bar between appointments because I scheduled a showing at 11 and a listing presentation at 12:30 and there's no time for an actual lunch.

Last year I closed 19 transactions. That sounds like a lot until you realize that to get those 19, I had to work with about 34 clients, go to probably 200 showings, host 28 open houses, and respond to something like 4,000 text messages. I did the math once because my husband Paul thought I was exaggerating how much I work. I showed him my phone screen time. He stopped asking.

Walk us through a day that didn't go to plan.

Last Wednesday. I had a listing appointment at 10 AM with a couple in Lutz who wanted to sell their house. I'd done my homework. I pulled the comps, built the CMA, the whole presentation. Their house is a 3-bed, 2-bath, about 1,800 square feet, built in 2004. Based on recent sales in their neighborhood, I was going to price it at $365,000. Reasonable number. Two comparable properties closed within $8,000 of that in the last 60 days.

I get there, I sit down at their kitchen table, I go through my presentation. Nice kitchen, by the way. They'd redone the countertops. And the husband, Larry, just stares at me and says, "Our neighbor told us she got $410,000 for hers." And I know exactly which house he's talking about because I pulled that comp. It's a 4-bed, 2,200 square feet, pool, fully renovated kitchen, and it closed seven months ago when rates were lower. It is not the same house. But Larry heard $410,000 and that's the number in his head now.

I spent 25 minutes walking them through why their house is not the same as the neighbor's house. I showed them the square footage difference, the pool, the timing. Larry's wife, Diane, was with me. She kept nodding. But Larry had the number and he wasn't letting go. He said, "We'll think about it." Which in real estate means either they're going to call another agent who'll tell them what they want to hear, or they'll come back in three weeks after that agent's overpriced listing sits for 40 days. Either way, I drove 35 minutes to that appointment, spent an hour there, drove 35 minutes back, and made zero dollars.

That's a lot of time for no outcome.

Welcome to the job. I'd say one in three listing appointments ends like that. The seller has a number in their head, and it's based on something their neighbor said, or something they saw on Zillow, or the price they need to net in order to put 20% down on their next house. My job is to tell them the truth. Some agents won't. Some agents will list it at $410,000 to get the listing and then do a price reduction in 30 days. I don't do that because it wastes everyone's time and it tanks the listing's days-on-market, which makes the house look stale. But the agent who lists at $410,000 gets the listing today, and I don't. That's the competitive dynamic nobody tells you about in licensing school.

What happened the rest of that Wednesday?

At 1 PM I had a closing. One of my buyers, the Campos family, first-time homebuyers. They'd been looking for five months. We wrote four offers. Lost three. The fourth one got accepted on a 3-bed in Wesley Chapel, $327,000. I was genuinely happy for them. Maria Campos cried when the offer got accepted. Like, she called me and she was crying on the phone and I was sitting in my car and I got teary too because that's the part of this job that is actually great.

So we get to closing, which is at the title company. Everyone's there. The Campos family, the seller's agent, the title officer. And at 12:45, fifteen minutes before closing, the title company calls me and says the buyer's wire transfer hasn't arrived. $14,800 in closing costs, sitting somewhere between their bank and the title company's escrow account. Maria is in the parking lot with her two kids. I'm on the phone with Amara, my lender. Amara is on the phone with the bank. The bank says the wire was sent at 9 AM and it should be there. The title company says it's not there.

We waited two hours. Maria's kids were doing homework in the title company lobby. The seller's agent, a guy I'd never worked with before, was visibly annoyed. At 3:15 the wire cleared. We closed. Maria got her keys. The whole thing took four and a half hours for what should have been a 45-minute appointment. I didn't charge Maria for the extra time, obviously. Nobody does. But I burned my entire afternoon on a wire transfer delay that wasn't anyone's fault, and I had to reschedule a showing I'd had at 3.

How does the money actually work? People assume agents make a lot.

OK so let me break this down because this is the thing that shocks people. On a $327,000 sale like the Campos deal, the total commission was 5%. That's $16,350. But that's split between the listing side and the buyer side. My half, as the buyer's agent, was $8,175. Then my brokerage takes their split. I'm on a 70/30 split with my broker Rick, which means he gets 30% of my commission. So Rick gets $2,452. I'm left with $5,722. But I'm not done. I pay a $395 transaction fee to the brokerage per closing. I pay my own E&O insurance, about $1,800 a year. MLS dues, $1,100 a year. Marketing costs for my listings, probably $600 a month on average. Self-employment tax is 15.3% on my net income.

When you add it all up, that $16,350 commission that the public sees becomes about $3,800 in my pocket after everything. And I worked with the Campos family for five months. The total hours I put into that deal, between showings, offer writing, negotiations, inspections, and hand-holding, was probably 60 to 70 hours. That's roughly $55 an hour. Which is fine. It's not bad. But it's not the big commission check people imagine when they see the listing price on Zillow and do the math wrong.

You said "hand-holding." What does that mean in practice?

It means managing the emotional state of people who are spending more money than they've ever spent on anything. Maria Campos called me 11 times during the inspection period alone. The inspector found a crack in the foundation wall. It was a hairline crack, cosmetic, structurally irrelevant. The inspector's report said so. But Maria saw the word "foundation" and "crack" in the same sentence and she panicked. I spent 40 minutes on the phone walking her through what a hairline crack means versus what a structural crack means. Her brother-in-law, who is not a structural engineer but has opinions, told her to back out of the deal. I had to gently suggest that her brother-in-law's construction experience from building a deck doesn't really apply to a slab foundation.

That's the job. The houses are the easy part. The people are the hard part. When I was in hotel management, I used to deal with guests who were upset about their room or the pool temperature or whatever. This is that but multiplied by $300,000 of their savings. The emotional stakes are just fundamentally different. A bad hotel experience, you write a review. A bad house purchase, you're stuck for 30 years.

What's yours?

How much of the job is pretending you're not desperate. Real estate is a feast-or-famine business and everyone knows it, but nobody talks about what famine feels like when you're a year and a half in and the market slows down and your phone stops ringing.

My third year, which was 2022, I had a stretch from late September through mid-November where I didn't close a single deal. Seven weeks. Rates had jumped and half my buyers paused their search. I had one listing that expired without selling. I was spending money on marketing, on my MLS fees, on gas, on everything, and nothing was coming in. Paul's income covered the mortgage, but I felt like I was bleeding. And the whole time, I'm posting on Instagram about the housing market. I'm going to networking events. I'm at open houses smiling at strangers. Because if I look worried, nobody hires me. Nobody wants their real estate agent to seem like she needs the commission. You have to project confidence and stability while your savings account is dropping by $800 a month.

That gap between how you're doing and how you need to appear to be doing, that's the part they don't cover in the licensing course. Every agent I know has a version of this story. Most of them just don't tell it out loud because it's bad for business.

You went from coaching football to selling million-dollar houses. How does that happen?

It wasn't a plan. I was coaching at Mesa Mountain View, defensive backs, JV and varsity. Loved the work. The pay was, well, you know what assistant coaching pay is. I was making $42,000 including the stipend. My buddy Craig from church was trying to sell his parents' house after his dad passed. The house was a 4-bed in North Scottsdale, nice place, and Craig didn't trust the agent they'd talked to because the agent showed up in flip-flops. Craig said, "You're the most organized person I know, and you actually show up places dressed like an adult." He was half kidding. But I looked into what it would take to get a license and it was a 90-hour course. I did it in three weeks, evenings after practice. Passed the exam. Helped Craig sell the house for $485,000 in 2008, which was terrible timing because the market was falling apart, but the house sold because it was priced right. My commission check was about $7,200 after the split. More than a month of coaching salary for three weeks of work.

I didn't quit coaching right away. I did real estate on the side for about two years. But by 2010 I was closing a deal a month and the coaching schedule was making it impossible to be available during the day when clients needed me. I left coaching at 34. Hardest professional decision I've made. I still miss it sometimes. I miss the kids. I miss game nights. I miss the film room. But I don't miss the money, and I definitely don't miss the politics of high school athletics administration.

What's different about luxury real estate versus the regular market?

The houses are different, obviously. My average sale last year was $1.35 million. But the real difference is the clients. In the $300,000 market, people are stretching. They're anxious about the mortgage, about the inspection, about whether they can afford the repairs. In the luxury market, the money is usually not the issue. The issue is ego, control, and perfectionism. My buyers at this level have made money by being demanding and particular. They bring that into the home search.

Art Fielding, one of my longest clients, he's a semi-retired developer who buys two or three investment properties a year in the Scottsdale corridor. Art walks into a house and within 90 seconds he's calculating what he'd need to spend to bring it to his standard. He'll say something like, "The pool equipment is 2019 vintage, the roof has maybe four years left, the HVAC is undersized for this square footage." And he's right. Art has bought probably 20 properties through me over the years and he's never been wrong about a mechanical assessment. That's a different kind of client than someone who asks me if the refrigerator comes with the house.

Walk us through a deal that got complicated.

Last month. I had a listing at $1.6 million. Beautiful 5-bed in Gainey Ranch, about 4,200 square feet, saltwater pool, completely remodeled kitchen. The seller, a woman named Judith, had lived there for 22 years. Her kids grew up in that house. She was downsizing to a condo in Old Town. Emotionally attached is an understatement. She had a photo collage in the hallway from every Christmas since 2004. I had to have the conversation about depersonalizing the space, which is always uncomfortable because you're essentially telling someone to erase the evidence of their life so strangers can imagine their own.

We got an offer at $1.52 million after 16 days on market. Good offer. Strong buyer, pre-approved, conventional financing, 45-day close. Judith wanted to counter at $1.575. I thought she should take the $1.52. We compromised on a counter of $1.555. The buyer came back at $1.54. Judith accepted. Fine. Everybody's happy. Then the inspection happened.

What was the inspection like?

The inspector flagged 47 items. Forty-seven. Now, in a 22-year-old house that's been well maintained, most of those are cosmetic or minor. A few outlets that weren't GFCI protected in the bathrooms. Some weathered caulking around windows. The pool heater was functional but near end of life. Normal stuff. I reviewed the report and I would have asked for maybe four or five things. The buyer's agent, Christine, came back with a repair request for all 47 items. Every single one. Including "scuff marks on garage floor." I am not exaggerating. That was item number 31.

Judith called me and she was furious. "They want me to fix scuff marks on the garage floor? I've lived here for 22 years. Of course there are scuff marks." I agreed with her, but I also had to keep her from sending an angry response. In luxury real estate, emotions kill deals. I told her, "We're not going to respond tonight. We're going to sleep on it and I'm going to call Christine in the morning and figure out what they actually care about versus what they're using as leverage."

Called Christine the next morning. She was smart. She knew the 47-item list was a negotiating position, not a real ask. After about 20 minutes on the phone, we figured out that the buyer actually cared about four things: the pool heater ($6,800 to replace), two windows that had failed seals ($2,400), the GFCI outlets ($600), and a crack in the patio that was potentially structural. I got my contractor out to look at the patio crack. He said it was settling, not structural, and wrote a letter. The real negotiation was the pool heater. The buyer wanted it replaced before closing. Judith didn't want to spend $6,800 on a house she was leaving. We settled on a $5,000 credit at closing. The other items, Judith agreed to fix. Total repair cost including the credit: about $8,400. Judith started at "zero, I'm not fixing anything" and we landed at $8,400. The buyer started at "fix everything" and we landed at the four items that mattered. That negotiation took 11 days. My phone log shows 23 calls with either Judith, Christine, or my contractor during that stretch. My commission on the sale was $46,200 before my split. It was a good deal. But those 11 days aged me.

You mentioned your wife Karen handles your transactions. What does that mean?

Karen is licensed. She's been my transaction coordinator for the last 11 years. That means once we go under contract, she manages the timeline. Inspection deadline, appraisal deadline, loan contingency, title work, HOA document delivery, all of it. She's the one sending the reminders, collecting the documents, making sure the lender and the title company are on the same page. On the Judith deal, Karen was managing 14 separate deadlines over a 45-day period. If one of those slips, the contract could fall apart or we could be in breach. Karen is better at that than I am. I'm good at the relationship side, the listing presentations, the negotiations. She's good at making sure the train stays on the tracks.

We work from the brokerage office three days a week and from home two days. Our daughter Megan, she's 21, she's been talking about getting her license after she graduates in May. I'm encouraging it, but I also told her to get a salaried job first. Real estate without savings is brutal. I didn't have savings when I left coaching and the first year, Karen and I put $9,000 on a credit card to cover our marketing and living expenses. We paid it off, but I don't recommend that path.

How is selling luxury homes different from coaching?

More similar than you'd think. Coaching is reading the other side. You watch film, you identify tendencies, you build a game plan around what the other team does in specific situations. Real estate negotiations are the same thing. When Christine sent that 47-item repair request, I read it the way I'd read a defensive formation. What's real, what's a bluff, where's the pressure coming from. Christine was blitzing. She was showing her client that she was fighting for every item. But I knew from the conversation that the buyer genuinely wanted the house. You don't get to day 11 of repair negotiations if you're ready to walk. So I played the fourth quarter. Stayed patient. Gave Judith confidence that we'd get there. The deal closed.

The biggest difference is that in coaching, the outcome matters for about 48 hours and then there's next week's game. In real estate, a bad deal follows someone for decades. Judith's going to live with that $1.54 million sale price and whatever she does with the money for the rest of her life. The stakes feel different when you're playing with someone's home equity instead of a scoreboard.

What's yours?

How much of my income depends on people going through transitions they didn't plan for. I've had three listing clients this year. One is Judith, downsizing after her kids left. The other two were a divorce and a death. The divorce couple, they needed to sell the house as part of the settlement. The death, a family selling their mother's home after she moved to assisted living. Real estate celebrates closings. I post the "SOLD" photos on Instagram. But a lot of my listings start with someone's life falling apart, or at least changing in ways they didn't choose.

When I was coaching, a loss was a loss. Everybody shook hands. In real estate, I've sat at kitchen tables with people who are crying because they don't want to sell their house but they can't afford it anymore, or the marriage is over, or mom can't live alone. And my job is to get them the best price. Which I do. But the celebration of closing, the Instagram post, the "Congratulations to my wonderful clients," that feels hollow sometimes when you know the backstory. Karen and I have a rule: we don't post closing photos for divorce sales or estate sales unless the client specifically asks. Some of them do. Most don't.

You left a steady office job for real estate. What were the first six months like?

Terrifying. And I don't say that for dramatic effect, I mean the financial terror of going from a $52,000 salary with health insurance and a 401k to literally zero guaranteed income. My last day at the insurance company was a Friday. The following Monday I showed up at my brokerage's office, which is this big open-plan thing in a strip mall in Towson with about 220 agents technically affiliated with it, and I sat at one of those hot desks and I had no idea what to do. Nobody gave me a training manual. Nobody gave me clients. The broker, a woman named Brenda who runs the office, she said, "You need to be on the phone. Call your sphere." My sphere at that point was my mom, my college friends, and the people I followed on Instagram. I did not have a sphere.

My first closing was four and a half months in. A rental listing. I helped a couple find an apartment in Federal Hill. My commission was $1,100. I cried in my car after because I was so relieved to have made any money at all. Four and a half months of expenses, of MLS dues, of business cards, of driving around Baltimore looking at apartments, and I made $1,100. My college friend Aisha got her license the same month I did. She quit after eight months. She's back in corporate now, doing marketing for a healthcare company. She makes $74,000. I think about that sometimes.

What does your daily routine look like now, two and a half years in?

It's more structured than it was. I wake up at 7. I check my email and the MLS for new listings that match any of my active buyers. Right now I have four buyer clients. Two are active, meaning they're going to showings and ready to write offers. Two are "active" in the sense that they say they want to buy a house but haven't been to a showing in three weeks. One of those, a guy named Keith, went to 14 showings with me over two months, loved a townhouse in Locust Point, asked me to write an offer, and then stopped returning my texts. Fourteen showings. That's probably 20 hours of my time including driving. He just vanished. I saw on Instagram three weeks later that he'd bought a house with another agent. He didn't tell me. He just ghosted.

That's rough. Can you do anything about that?

Not really. I didn't have a buyer's agency agreement with Keith because at the time I wasn't confident enough to ask for one. Brenda told me afterward, "Always get the agreement signed before the first showing." She was right. I'd been afraid that asking Keith to sign a contract would scare him off. Instead, not asking lost me the deal entirely. That was a $12,000 lesson. I've had a buyer's agreement for every client since.

After the MLS check, I do an hour of lead generation. That used to mean cold calling, which I hated and was terrible at. Now it means posting on Instagram, following up with past open house visitors, and reaching out to my database. "Database" sounds fancy. It's 340 people in my CRM, color-coded by how they found me. About 80 of those are people I've actually met in person. The rest are names from open house sign-in sheets and social media DMs. Most of them will never buy a house with me. But Brenda says you need a database of at least 500 before the referrals start compounding. I'm at 340. I can feel it starting to turn. Last month, I got a referral from a past client for the first time. A woman named Denise bought a condo with me last year, and she told her coworker to call me. That felt like the first sign that this thing might actually work.

What's been your biggest deal so far?

I closed a townhouse last month in Canton for $318,000. Three bedrooms, end unit, updated kitchen. The buyers were a couple, both teachers, and they'd been saving for a down payment for three years. I found the listing on a Tuesday, got them in for a showing Wednesday morning before it hit the major search portals, and we wrote the offer that night. There were two other offers by Thursday. We won because we offered escalation up to $325,000 and waived the appraisal gap. The house appraised at $315,000, which meant my clients had to bring an extra $3,000 to closing to cover the gap. I'd explained that risk before we wrote the offer, so they were prepared, but I still felt the weight of it. Three thousand dollars is a lot of money for two teachers.

My gross commission on that deal was about $7,950. After my 60/40 split with the brokerage and my expenses, I kept around $3,900. That was a good month. The problem is what happened after.

What happened after?

Nothing. That's the answer. I closed the Canton townhouse on February 18th. From February 19th through March 10th, I had zero new leads. Nobody called. Nobody DM'd me. I went to two open houses and got eight sign-ins total, and none of them responded to my follow-up. I was refreshing my email like it was a slot machine. Every time my phone buzzed I grabbed it hoping it was a new lead. It was usually a text from my mom asking if I wanted to come over for dinner.

That stretch, those three weeks, that's the thing about real estate that nobody prepares you for. The highs are real. Closing the Canton deal, handing those teachers the keys, that was genuinely one of the best moments of my professional life. But the lows come immediately after and they feel disproportionate. You go from "I'm great at this, I'm helping people, I'm making money" to "my phone isn't ringing and I don't know why and maybe Keith was right to ghost me." My mom Gloria calls once a week and asks how things are going, and there's always a pause before she asks that tells me she's really asking, "Are you going to get a real job?"

You mentioned you came from insurance claims. Does that background help?

In ways I didn't expect. I spent four years reading insurance policies and processing claims. That job trained me to read contracts carefully, which is probably the single most useful skill in real estate that nobody thinks of as a real estate skill. I caught a title issue on the Canton deal that the title company missed. There was an old lien from a contractor who'd done work on the property in 2019. It was for $4,200. The title search didn't flag it because it was filed in the wrong county. I noticed it because I was reading the seller's disclosure and they mentioned a kitchen renovation in 2019, and the permit record showed a contractor name that didn't match any release of lien. I called the title company and asked. They found the lien. It got resolved before closing, but if I hadn't caught it, my clients would have closed on a property with a $4,200 lien attached.

Victor, one of the more experienced agents in my office, he told me that was a "year five catch." He said most agents don't read the seller's disclosure that carefully until they've been burned by it. I read it carefully because I spent four years at an insurance company where missing a detail in a claim file meant a $50,000 error. The habits transferred. The pay did not, but the habits did.

What's yours?

How alone it is. I work in an office with 220 agents and I have maybe two people I'd call friends. Victor is one. Brenda is my mentor but she's also managing 50 other agents and I'm not her priority. Everyone else is technically my competition. The woman who sits three desks from me, we're going after the same listings in the same neighborhoods. We're polite. We're not sharing strategies.

At my insurance job, I had a team. We ate lunch together. We complained about the same things. We had a group chat. In real estate, I eat lunch alone in my car between showings. My "team" is me, my CRM, and my phone. When I have a bad week, nobody notices. When I have a good week, nobody notices that either unless I post about it. The independence is supposed to be the selling point. "Be your own boss." And I get it, I like not having a manager breathing down my neck. But on the days when Keith ghosts me or Larry from Lutz won't listen to the comps or my phone doesn't ring for three weeks, there's nobody to talk to about it who understands what it feels like. Aisha understood. Aisha quit. My boyfriend is supportive but he works in IT and his version of a bad day is a server going down. My version of a bad day is not knowing if I'll make rent in April.