Katy

A friend of mine suggested that getting my Real Estate License (again) would be a good idea, that this would be something my business partner and I should do it.  Her reasons made sense, and it was an idea we had considered before.  With the market changes, or our company specializing in Rental Homes and Apartments, I new I could gain more knowledge!  Besides, it sounded like fun, after all, I have not been in school for longer then I care to admit.  So off I went, back to school.

I originally got my license back in the 90’s.  At the time I decided on this path because I needed to make lots of money (like most people I know, I love to shop), I wanted to have more time with our kids and was really looking forward to more flexible hours (FYI – new agents beware – this is a myth).  My husband had just been transferred to Idaho and I did not know anyone, so there was the added bonus of making new friends.

Times were tough back then.  We were recovering from a mild recession and jobs were hard to find (the unemployment rate was close to bottoming out at 7.2% even though the recession had been over for over a year).  The Real Estate market had slumped, stocks had tumbled (but only for a few months) and then of course there were the Savings and Loans that collapsed.  At the time we really only looked for home sales, yet I did find my best clients were investors in rental homes and property managers.  Oh, the benefits on hindsight.

 We were all in a small classroom with maybe 20 people; of course Boise ID was a much, much smaller town.   We were there for different reasons.  One student was there because she had her license in another state – but heard Idaho was a better market, several were looking for a career changes and some just wanted a career.  Truth be told, we were crazy, entering Real Estate is that economy. 

So for two weeks we went to the same classroom.  Everyday it was the same students and the same teacher.  He did have guest speakers come in to talk about certain topics, but for the most part, we were it.   The teacher was a character, with larger then life stories to make it interesting. It was fun and exciting.   We all got to know each other and I made several long time friends. 

At the time are main topic of conversation was “passing the test”.  They put the fear of … in us and how hard it was going to be, how many people had to take it multiple times and each time you had to pay for it.  That was not an option I wanted to explore.

It seemed like I had to wait forever to take the test (they only gave the test at a certain time each month) and happily I passed it the first time.  Not everyone in my class was so lucky, but eventually all my new friends did pass.

The great thing was the success rate of many of my friends.  We had one classmate who eventually became a broker, a couple graduated into the mortgage industry (including me) and a few sold Real Estate either full or part time for years.  Looking back our class did stay very close to the statistics.