40-80 hours of actual effort? What? I'm calling bullshit on that. I can see that work might need to be done on the property and the real estate agent coordinates that work. But that work is billed at an hourly rate and while it might come out of the agent's commission, it usually doesn't. Finally, let's say a house needs 80 hours of work. At what rate? $50/hour? So that's $4,000. If the work is paid from the agent's commission, and the agent still gets about $30,000 for the sale, they're still getting $26,000 - and for how much work does the AGENT actually put in? Again, I'm guessing the AGENT only puts in maybe 10 hours per sale. That's still $2,600/hour and it's ridiculous.
Speaking as a former Realtor ™, it's not BS. If an agent is lucky, he can get a sale closed with 10-15 hrs invested. What usually happens is he hauls his buyers around two counties to view a few or many properties, and he does that for free, hoping to get a sale. He may also be responsible for getting the lawn mowed or he may need to shovel the snow off the sidewalk himself to show a house. He also burns time prospecting for clients and being interviewed by sellers or buyers shopping for an agent. What you see on "Selling Sunset" is fiction.
Okay, I get that. But I'm looking for the number of hours per sale. If a real estate agent is selling 5 houses and spends 100 hours total working on them, then the number of hours they spend on average per house is 20. And even at that, with a $1M house, and a 3% commission, that agent is earning $1,500 per hour of actual work. I think that's way WAY too much by a couple of orders of magnitude given the level of education a person needs to do that job. It's an affront and an insult to people with advanced educations and levels of intelligence doing far more complicated and honestly more important work than selling houses.
Same as any high dollar sales gig. It sounds like lot of money, but if the agent only closes 1 or 2 sales a month, it changes the picture. Keep in mind, I'm talking about individual agents who do all their own work. The 'agent team' comprised of several support people, get their paychecks from the agent commissions. The lead agent is under a lot of pressure to perform.
Call bullshit if you wish. You seem to have your mind made up about what you want to be true based on your load of assumptions that you also assume to be accurate and true because it is you that is making the assumption.
I've described an actual agent I know and how much effort they have had to put in toward getting one or more homes sold. Why ask a question if you are just going to shit on an answer that tells you what you have asked and discard the information shared and instead double-down on your uninformed assumptions as what is true?
Tried to help and you've shown you're not worth my time. Noted for the future.
I'm calling bullshit because I KNOW the agents themselves don't put in 80 hours of work per week to sell ONE house. That makes absolutely no sense. Maybe their whole team put in that much time (though I doubt that too), but not the AGENT.