Last night I went online to look up information about an agent in one of our nearby offices who I hadn’t yet met.  She has a listing one of my buyers is interested in and I always like to get a feel for the who I’ll be working with before a transaction begins.  I went to our company’s web page and was very surprised to see that my office has lost a little more than 20 agents in the past five years.  We’ve gone from about 65 agents to 42.  That surprises me down to my toes.

My own office echoes what’s going on in the rest of the nation.  MB007, a blog about mortgage brokers, is saying we’re losing agents in record numbers, a statistic backed by the National Association of Realtors.  MB007 said people taking the state real estate exam are down 93 percent and it’s not just affecting new licensees but others who’ve been in business for years,

Selling phone book ads is less fun than real estate, he said, but he’s happy to be able to pay his bills. He still has a real estate license, but a month ago he turned in the lockbox key that agents pay for annually and need if they want to show property to clients.

My friends?  Two are now brokers.  One has changed companies to sell commercial only (now down, too).  Another is an office manager at a used car lot.  A boat-load have gone to companies with a more generous broker/agent split.  One has gone back to full-time nursing, but is selling part-time.

On the mortgage lender side, the industry is also losing loan officers on MSNBC.  And they are losing their homes, too.  One lender has become "the poster child for the real estate slide":

Her income has fallen 85 percent and her home is in pre-foreclosure, scheduled to be auctioned to the highest bidder in August.  Butterfield is hardly alone. Among the many victims of the housing industry meltdown, the millions of people who worked in the field are among the hardest hit.

We will recover. This time next year, I hope we’ll all be breathing a sigh of relief.