Get your rotten tomatoes out: I'm one of America's million-strong army of real estate agents.
So of course a friend sent me a highly e-mailed business story of the NY Times: that real estate agents are dropping out.
Since Realtors' aggregate numbers are still rising, that's not the general point of the piece - instead, there are many anecdotal stories about agents falling away. The writer, Katie Hafner, doesn't use the phrase "thinning the herd," but that's what appears to be happening. The residential real estate biz is weakening nationally, and the weak are dropping out.
But interestingly enough, of the four women Ms. Hafner interviewed, two stayed on as traditional real estate agents, and two have simply switched to other sales jobs.
It's always dangerous to make generalizations - or in this case, genderalizations - about somebody else's work, but it raises the question of why sales is so rewarding for women.
I'd argue it's because straight corporate work is such a crappy alternative. Certainly it looks that way in the aggregate - women still make only seventy-seven cents for every dollar earned by men, according to the National Organization for Women.
But it also looks that way anecdotally - I came to real estate as a second career after fifteen years of business journalism. I found even when I had great successes - projects that made millions - I didn't get rich.
I think this is true for a lot of women in the corporate world - it's not that we can't make money, it's that we can't capture it. A sales career, at least, seems to remove that barrier.
How am I doing? It's tough to tell. My first year away from the corporate world, I ended up writing a book about my career switch. My second year out, I put together a little file of laudatory book reviews (thanks, Newsweek!), honest and helpful housing advice (thanks, Money magazine!) and placed some nice people in some nice homes. On bad days it feels like a dumb move, on good days (like today, when I deposited a fat commission check into my bank account) it feels like I could never do anything else.