A colleague who is a broker in California sent me these licensing stats earlier this week.

There are 434,000 individuals with active real estate licenses in California.
 
Of the 434,000, there are 126,000 who have broker licenses and 307,000 who have sales agent licenses.  
 
The total numbers of licenses are only down by 24,000 over the last two years.
 
At this moment, there are 31,000 listings in the whole state of California.
 
Times are tough, and there are a lot of agents pursuing a very limited amount of business.
 
You’d think this would cause many more agents to leave the business (totals are down less than 1%) and deter others from getting into the game.
 
And yet almost 7,000 individuals are scheduled to sit for their real estate exam in August.
 
It never stops.
 
With this many agents in the existing pool and another 80,000 agents entering the game this year, you must have a selection strategy to keep from wasting opportunity costs and work time on non-performers.
 
Yes, you must always be recruiting.   But in today’s environment you must also always be selecting the agents who have the most talent. 
 
Somebody is going to survive.  It’s best if it’s you AND the agents you hire.