Jobs: Out of the Frying Pan

Yesterday I used my faculty tuition waiver to sign up for one of the two courses required to get a real estate license. Well…two and a half—there’s a half-unit thing on contracts you have to take before you can sit for the exam. As soon as I can get through them and get a Realtor’s license, I’m going to try to find a part-time  job as a gofer in a real estate office.

I’m not interested in selling houses—don’t think I would be good at sales. What I’d like to do is help a successful sales agent with the behind-the-scenes stuff: filling out paperwork, filing, answering the phones, keeping track of appointments. My friend who is a very successful agent tells me that state law requires anyone working in a real estate office, no matter what the job, to be licensed. He says the courses are very easy and even kind of interesting.

Thanks to the waiver, a three-credit course costs me $15. Not a bad little lagniappe: resident tuition at the community colleges here is $75/credit hour. So all-told the underpaid teaching gig should save me about $445.

It’s a pain to have to change course this late in life. However, there’s no question in my mind that sooner or later our bat-brained legislators are going to succeed in making it legal to tote a gun onto the campus. And that is just beyond the pale: no way am I going to stand up in front of a classroom not knowing which and how many students, some of whom are even crazier than the local politicians, have pistols in their backpacks and purses. That is just simply unacceptable.

These courses are offered in short sessions, so I with any luck I should complete them by the end of this summer or, at the latest, by the middle of fall semester.

I figure a 50% FTE job as an underling in a Realtor’s office can’t possibly pay much less than I’m earning teaching in the colleges, and the salary would come in 50 or 52 weeks a year. The business of getting paid eight out of twelve months—when in fact you’re filling your summer and winter breaks with unpaid course-prep work—is for the birds.

Actually, if I did sell houses I might earn as much as I do teaching without putting in a lot more than 20 hours a week. A real estate agent has to split his or her sales commission with the broker and the agency: that is, on a 6% commission, the selling agent gets 3% and then has to fork over half of that again, finally pocketing around 1.5%. So, on the sale of a $200,000 house, you’d make around $3,000 (from which you’re paying the cost of continuing ed, wear and tear on your car, phone service, etc.).

Well. At that rate I would have to sell 5.6 $200,000 houses to earn what I make if I carry the maximum load allowable for adjunct faculty.

That probably isn’t an unreasonable goal, even for a newbie.

At least this will give me a back-up plan. I’d continue to teach the online magazine writing course, if the chair agrees. But I am not going into a classroom full of armed eighteen-year-olds and nutcases.

Image: Semiautomatic pistol. Yaf. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license