Benefits of being a real estate agent: No upper salary limit

There are many benefits of being a real estate agent, and there are some challenges as well. I thought I’d share a few of the benefits and challenges, one at a time, of what it means to own the real estate agent title.  The first one is — there is no upper salary limit.

I worked in a large corporation for nearly 30 years before I left to try my hand at being an independent contractor.  While I was employed in Corporate America, I learned that if you worked your butt off every single day, the raise and bonus (if applicable) would be nearly the same as the raise and bonus for someone who just coasted by and did the minimum required.  That wasn’t because the ones who provided the increases didn’t want to treat better employees better, but because budgets and guidelines prepared for large corporations simply don’t leave room for huge differences in pay.  All job titles had a salary range, and you couldn’t move up in the salary range for any particular job much faster than others in the same job, so the focus was on treating everyone basically the same, not on stimulating creativity and productivity.

And then I threw the relative safety of working for a large corporation to the wind, and went off in search of a career that would be better suited to my interests and my desires.  Over the last few years as I learned the real estate agent trade, I have found there are many benefits of being an agent, one of which is that there is no upper salary limit to my job.

My pay is totally up to me.  If I do a stellar job, signing up clients like crazy, marketing my worth to beat the band, increasing the average sale prices of homes I sell, selling double the houses one year over the next, I can increase my salary exponentially.  There won’t be any meeting with my boss who tells me that I was the most productive employee who saved the company millions or made the company millions, but oh, I’m sorry, we can only give you 0.5% of a wage increase.  Instead, I alone am responsible for doing whatever it takes to make the income I want to make, and having no upward limit is a wonderful feeling.

Of course, the reverse is true; this benefit can also be a challenge, but I will deal with that in a separate post.  For now, one of the benefits of being a real estate agent is that there is no upper salary limit.