Shaleana Stout became a broker with Exit Realty last year and hopes to increase her clientele in the competitive real estate market in Bend. (Ryan Brennecke/Bulletin photo)

As home prices have risen in Central Oregon, so has the number of newly minted real estate brokers.

The Oregon Real Estate Agency issued 200 new broker licenses in Central Oregon last year, and license-exam preparation classes continue to be full, said Janda Fleming, vice president of training at Superior Schools and an instructor at Central Oregon Community College. A total of 672 new broker licenses have been issued in Central Oregon since 2013.

Seasoned real estate professionals said new brokers have to work hard for a piece of the local market, which was worth more than $1.5 billion in 2016, according to the Central Oregon Association of Realtors. There are few new listings to go around. Throughout 2016, Bend had less than a three-month supply of single-family homes, according to Beacon Appraisal Group.

The 3,601 residential properties sold in Bend last year represented a 2-percent increase over the prior year, according to the Realtors association.

The number of association members has grown at about the same pace, from 1,781 in January 2016 to 1,821 last month.

“They enter this business because they hear realtors make a lot of money,” said Jim Mazziotti, principal broker at Exit Realty in Bend. “The fact of the matter is most real estate agents don’t make a lot of money.”

To be sure, brokers stand to earn more per transaction than they have in years, as median sale prices near the pre-recession peak. The median price of a single-family home in Bend was $371,000 in January, according to Beacon. If a buyer’s agent and seller’s agent split a 5-percent commission, each side will earn $9,275 on a sale at the Bend median price.

Most agents have to share 10 percent to 30 percent of the commission with their brokerage to cover marketing and overhead costs. What’s more, Mazziotti said, the typical agent completes only four transactions a year. So even with sale prices climbing, a broker’s gross income for the year is likely to be less than $30,000.

Mazziotti hosts free webinars in his office that are open to any realtor because he said he wants to give people a chance to learn sales techniques, which aren’t covered in the 150 hours of training the state of Oregon requires for a broker’s license. More training elevates the profession as a whole, Mazziotti said. It also attracts new brokers, who share their earnings with the principal broker.

Shaleana Stout received her broker’s license last year and this year set a stretch goal of completing 20 transactions. She started working at Exit in September and completed her first transaction as a buyer’s agent in October. Landing her first listing and closing the deal took until January. Now she’s on the hunt for new listings, and many of the people in her personal network are also Realtors.

At a meeting of fellow youth basketball coaches, she learned that six of the 30 volunteers are also Realtors, and one is co-coaching with Stout. “It was a great opportunity for me to meet another Realtor,” she said.

Stout and her husband, Ian, saved money for about a year to cover her career transition, and his job as a manager at a bioscience company allows her to take the risk in the first place, she said. “My eyes were wide open and so were his when I went into it,” she said. “I’m happy with it so far.““

Anyone who’s considering a career in real estate shouldn’t be intimidated because a lot of those competitors won’t last, Fleming said. “What they need to realize is it’s a high-turnover business,” she said. Indeed, the Central Oregon Association of Realtors says it had 2,400 members at the height of the last housing boom and about 1,300 during the recession.

Fleming and Mazziotti both posited the so-called “80-20 rule” of real estate, which is to say that 80 percent of the work is done by 20 percent of the agents.

“You can’t sit there and wait for the phone to ring in this business,” Fleming said.

In a hot market, where there are more buyers than available listings, brokers will have to drum up listings, Fleming said. That means approaching for-sale-by-owner, or FSBO, sellers and talking to people who haven’t even listed their homes about whether this might be a good time to sell.

— Reporter: 541-617-7860, kmclaughlin@bendbulletin.com

Bumper crop of new brokers

New real estate licenses issued in Oregon have risen each year since 2013:

• 2013: 1,355

• 2014: 1,675

• 2015: 2,039

• 2016: 2,361

As have the number of new broker licenses in Central Oregon:

• 2013: 139

• 2014: 149

• 2015: 184

• 2016: 200

Source: Oregon Real Estate Agency