Frothy reality TV shows like “Selling Sunset” and “Buying Beverly Hills” may give the impression that it's different, but the average real estate agent in the United States doesn't drive up to open houses in a Lamborghini and navigate the cobblestone path to the front door in Louboutin heels.
According to the National Association of Realtors, you actually make about $50,000 per year. And each year, according to the Consumer Federation of America, nearly half of the more than three million licensed agents sell just one home — or no homes at all.
Real estate — an area with few benefits for agents and a cutthroat sales model — can be a risky game. For most people the gain is small. However, for a select few, real estate offers an exclusive escape route that takes them from pennies to pennies.
But even these agents say their reality has nothing to do with the stories on TV. Here are three of them.
No longer an “outsider”.
How it started: Sere Conde came to New York City from Zambia at age 29 and folded T-shirts at Gap to pay the bills.
How it's going: She recently sold a two-bedroom apartment at 277 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan for $6.5 million and estimates she's sold nearly $300 million worth of real estate in the last three years.
Ms Conde, 50, was born in Guinea and grew up in Ivory Coast. When she was seven, her parents moved to Zambia to make money in mining, leaving her and her three siblings with her grandmother. Her parents later took her to Zambia to finish school.
She dreamed of doing business in America. To save money, she went to the market on weekends and browsed through second-hand clothes donated by Americans, selecting the nicest pieces, paying for dry cleaning, and then reselling them for a profit. After about three months, she had earned about $2,000.
So in 1994, at age 21, she moved to New York and lived with an aunt until she got on her feet, juggling a series of retail jobs at stores like Sephora and Gap while caring for her daughter, born in 1999. Eventually, she found herself behind the Clinique counter at Macy's, where customers told her she had a knack for sales and should try real estate.
She decided to go for it and enrolled in online real estate courses in 2020 as the market went crazy at the height of the coronavirus pandemic.
Four months later, she was already one of the top earners at her brokerage firm. “I was hungry,” she said. She then joined Douglas Elliman's Eklund Gomes team in 2022, led by celebrity agents Fredrik Eklund and John Gomes.
She now regularly closes million-dollar deals and focuses on expanding her social media accounts.
“I want to be known among wealthy black people,” she said. “I want them to know who I am so they can buy from me.”
“I’m a real outsider,” she added. “And I want the Robert Smiths of this world to know who Sere Conde is,” she said, referring to the private equity billionaire.
Selling houses after construction
How it all started: Carl Gambino was walking dogs and working in construction as he learned more about real estate.
How it's going: Mr. Gambino, 40, has sold more than $2.5 billion in real estate since 2015.
Carl Gambino is as close to a native New Yorker as they come. He was born in SoHo into a close-knit Italian family. His grandmothers, both over 90 years old, still live in the same building; His parents met there on the stairs when they were just 8 years old.
As a teenager and early 20s, he became addicted to drugs and alcohol, overdosing a few times. And for a few years there were days when he wasn't sure he would survive.
“It was quite an achievement to be a functioning human being,” he said.
His life changed when he met Sarah Ivory, the woman who would become his future wife, at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in October 2008. They moved to Los Angeles and he started working construction for $15 an hour. In his free time, he read self-help books and walked dogs in Hollywood for extra money.
A developer of one of the houses he was working on introduced him to Kurt Rappaport, the celebrity real estate agent whose clients include Beyoncé and Jay-Z.
Mr. Rappaport encouraged Mr. Gambino to obtain his California real estate license. But he knew he wouldn't make any money without customers. So he reached out to a network that already trusted him – with their pets.
“I started stalking my dog-walking clients and trying to get them to let me sell their houses,” Mr. Gambino said. “Some of them would laugh.”
But he persisted. One of his first big sales was to one of his dog-walking clients: Mr. Gambino sold him a $6 million house, earning enough commission to pay off most of his debts, including Ms. Ivory's tax bills, credit cards and student loans. Even the parking tickets for his blue Chevy Cruze, which had been sitting on bricks in front of his rent-controlled apartment after someone stole the tires from the vehicle, were finally paid off.
His customers often have several houses in different cities. He is now licensed in five states and his clients include Mark Wahlberg and Harry Styles.
He and wife Ivory now have two children and are now back in New York. Now he is writing his own self-help book.
From cold calling to celebrity customer lists
How it began: When Santiago Arana came to the United States, he slept on a family member's couch, worked as a busboy during the day, and took English classes at night.
How it works: He has $5 billion in sales and his clients include Ben Affleck, Lady Gaga and LeBron James.
In May 2003, as political unrest gripped his hometown of Tarija, Bolivia, Mr. Arana learned that he had received a scholarship to study finance in the United States. But the course was taught in English and he only knew a handful of words. So he flew to Santa Barbara, California, where a family member offered him a couch for a few months while he learned the language.
“I had $120,” he said of the day he arrived. “Which was a decent amount of money in Bolivia, but when I came here I realized it’s not the same.”
He bussed tables at a nearby high-end restaurant in wealthy Montecito. And when his shifts were over, he went to English class. As his language skills improved, he was promoted to waiter.
After a cousin suggested he get his real estate license, Mr. Arana began working with Keller Williams in Beverly Hills after giving up on the idea of getting a finance degree and relying on cold calling and door knocking to find clients. But for almost three years he struck. He continued to wait tables at night.
Then, in 2008, the financial crisis caused the markets around him to crash. He parked in front of another restaurant, applied for another job as a waiter and considered quitting real estate altogether.
But networking in the Spanish-speaking real estate industry in Los Angeles helped him. He approached Rodrigo Iglesias, a prominent agent from Argentina, who eventually offered him a position on his team at Sotheby's.
He also offered some advice: “It’s not what we do, but how we do it.” Mr. Arana, 45, took those words to heart.
“It’s really about the law of attraction,” he said. “It really all depends on your mind and your mindset and what you’re capable of.”
In 2013, Mr. Arana became a partner at the agency, the luxury brokerage firm founded by Mexico City-born celebrity agent Mauricio Umansky. He now has hundreds of millions of dollars worth of real estate sales every year and has a celebrity client list that reads like a front-row table at the Golden Globes.
“The reality is I’m grateful,” he said. “The American dream existed for me.”