Kelly Killoren Bensimon is no stranger to a career pivot. In 2009, she joined the cast of the Real Housewives of New York after having worked as a model and jewelry designer. Two years later, she left the show and did what many people with a bit of fame and a lot of marketing savvy do: She wrote books. She launched a line of fragrances, then candles, then outerwear. But by 2017, she’d realized that her skills were suited to what might have once seemed like a more quotidian job. She could go into real estate.
The industry has always been a relationship-driven business, where agents are expected to bring in clients on their own. And in theory, this might be easier for, say, a former TV star with a lot of social-media followers and a group of socialite friends to do than for an average person. “I was like, Wait a minute; I have a massive social platform,” Bensimon told me. “I can get myself out there.” She had also recently completed an M.B.A. and knew how to negotiate, read a market, and brand a product. So she took two weeks of intensive classes (“from, like, 8 a.m. in the morning until 10 o’clock at night”) and acquired her real-estate license. In 2021, her third year at the brokerage Douglas Elliman, she said she sold $110 million worth of homes.
Lately, a whole new population of people has been getting into the real-estate business: sort-of-famous celebrities. New converts include the Catfish host Nēv Schulman, the rapper Vanilla Ice, the Dancing With the Stars pro Emma Slater, and various retired NFL and NBA players in need of an alternative career. Joseph Baena, a son of Arnold Schwarzenegger, has an Instagram bio that captures the lifestyle well: “Actor | Bodybuilder | Cook | Realtor.” Like Bensimon, some of these people might have traditional business experience. Others might not.
Nationally, the housing market has become oversaturated with agents, and not just with ones who used to be on TV. The membership of the National Association of Realtors, a trade group including agents and brokers that sets standards across the industry, more than doubled from 1995 to 2026. (Agents are lower-level real-estate salespeople who need to be sponsored by a broker; brokers are more advanced salespeople, who can work independently and hire their own agents—and only members of NAR can call themselves Realtors.) Currently, about 1.4 million people are in NAR, which means its membership now outnumbers homes for sale. These days, selling houses has become the well-connected person’s version of gig work, a flexible job that can require only a few weeks of schooling and that can be done without ditching other passions.
But for everybody else—renters, homebuyers, sellers—this surfeit has a cost. People want an agent who can get them the best deal possible on one of life’s biggest financial transactions. But with so many inexperienced agents flooding the industry, finding one who’s actually good has become a game of roulette.
This isn’t the first time the real-estate industry has had a population of potentially underqualified agents. In the early 1900s, newspaper readers encountered headlines like “Real Estate Man Swindles a Poor Widow!” Shoddy agents were nicknamed “curbstoners,” and Americans tended to think of them as scamsters who lurked at train stations and upsold homes to new arrivals in a city. Troubled by all the people besmirching the occupation, a group of agents formed a national trade group in 1908—the one eventually known as NAR. With a code of ethics and a membership requirement, the group raised professional standards, Chloe Thurston, a political-science professor at Northwestern University who researches the history of housing, told me. They “made it harder to call yourself a Realtor or to be a member of this small but trustworthy profession.”
But by the second half of the 20th century, NAR seemed to loosen up. From 1970 to 1980, its membership increased eightfold, to more than 700,000—bolstered by a push to include low-level sales associates in its membership and a rush of women joining. Popular brokerage firms, such as Century 21 and Coldwell Banker, also began embracing franchising, licensing their names to upstart brokers across the country and helping to drive recruitment of thousands of new salespeople.
Perhaps the primary reason for the influx of agents, however, was that it was no longer so expensive for brokerages to hire new ones. In the 1980s, many salespeople went from being full-time employees to independent contractors: Brokerages stopped paying them a salary, instead taking a cut of commissions. Agents, in some cases, even paid annual fees to their brokerage. Real-estate jobs became more popular, and less financially stable, than ever.
Some agents thrust themselves into the spotlight. Elaine Young—the daughter of a Hollywood executive who was disappointed to discover, as she put it in her memoir, “I couldn’t sing or dance or act”—chose real estate as a way to keep the “glamor” of her childhood alive. She eventually sold homes to Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor, and Frank Sinatra, and by the end of the 1970s, she was one of the first real-estate agents drawing public intrigue in her own right. Young’s six marriages, feud with Zsa Zsa Gabor, and penchant for draping herself in mink jackets made her as much of a tabloid fixture as some of her clients.
In the early 2000s, reality TV created a new class of real-estate celebrities—solo entrepreneurs who seemed to cobble together lucrative careers out of sheer force of will, all while attending luxe parties across Los Angeles and New York City. Million Dollar Listing debuted in 2006 and became a franchise. Ryan Serhant, a star of the New York edition starting in 2012, was struggling to earn a living as an actor when he turned to real estate. Less than a decade later, Chrishell Stause, a star of the Netflix hit Selling Sunset, detailed her youth growing up homeless; entering real estate, in part, allowed her to finally find financial stability. Among the successful agents, at least, the money really can be good. In exchange for selling a $1 million home, an agent might expect to earn about $20,000, after factoring in their commission to the brokerage. Closing a single home won’t make you rich, but selling more than a dozen each year can add up pretty quickly.
These TV agents helped make real estate aspirational for anyone wanting to change careers. A housing boom in the early 2000s led to more agents too, according to the NAR. For the stay-at-home parent trying to overcome the long employment gap on their résumé, or the laid-off worker or contractor who has watched job mobility in their chosen career stagnate, real estate might have looked like it could be a safety net—even if the reality is that most agents aren’t making huge salaries from it. “I think the shows made it seem like it was an easy career,” Alexander Ali, who runs the Society Group, a PR firm for high-end real-estate agents, told me. “It seemed like, Wow, you can do a little bit of work and make hundreds of thousands of dollars on one deal.”
Still, the downside to at least trying to become an agent is minimal. Almost anybody can get licensed within a few months. “It’s also very low-barrier-entry” compared with other professions, Sharon Cornelissen, the director of housing for the Consumer Federation of America, a nonprofit that advocates for consumers, told me. Massachusetts, Vermont, and some other states require only 40 hours of real-estate schooling before licensure. In New York, real-estate agents need to complete 77 hours of education before they can take their licensing exam; by comparison, an aspiring cosmetologist must complete more than 1,000 hours of schooling before they can take an exam to do makeup and hair.
In fact, the hardest part about starting work as a real-estate agent is knowing enough people who might want you to sell their house. This may be why famous people—as well as less-than-famous people who have huge social networks—are flooding the market: Because they know more people, they have access to a bigger base of potential clients. After all, many people who hire real-estate agents choose somebody based on referrals from friends and family. “Oftentimes, there’s pressure to go with a real-estate agent just because they’re in your book club or something, or because your kids go to school together, or because they’re a family member,” Cornelissen said. A well-connected person is just going to start out with a lot more leads.
Yet being a successful agent requires more than just knowing a bunch of people. A good agent understands the local housing market (a ski town will have different seasonal sales trends than a beach town), a decent price to sell or buy for, and when to wait for a better price or to push ahead. They know what makes an appealing photo, which is perhaps an argument in favor of influencer agents (Cornelissen has encountered agents with very little awareness of how to market themselves online, and who take photos of homes at night, shrouded in darkness, with their iPhones). The best agents can handle the emotional work of buying a home—such as knowing whether somebody should heed or brush off their last-minute jitters.
But before they actually work with someone, few homebuyers or sellers can tell the difference between a solid agent and a mediocre one. And the chances of hiring somebody subpar is higher than it used to be: Less experienced agents are now a significant part of the housing market. In 2023, the Consumer Federation of America studied three largely middle-class cities (Minneapolis; Jacksonville, Florida; and Albuquerque, New Mexico) and estimated that “marginal agents”—meaning those with fewer than five home sales a year—accounted for 25 to 30 percent of all commission money. Some of those agents might have been perfectly serviceable, but the likelihood of sellers getting less than they could, or buyers overpaying, goes up as more people hire novice agents. “If you work with an inexperienced agent,” Cornelissen said, “you may leave a lot of money on the table.”
When I asked NAR about all the influencer and semi-celebrity agents, the group’s chief economist, Lawrence Yun, said in a statement, “it’s natural that real estate professionals are highly visible.” The housing sector, he noted, is simply a significant part of the broader economy. (The organization did not respond to questions about quality control of agents.)
Consumers can, of course, do their own research on how to better choose an agent before selling or buying a home. But Cornelissen told me that states could have stricter licensing rules, and that she believes that brokerages should mandate continued supervision and training even after agents start their work. And the real-estate industry itself has raised the standards on agents in the past; in theory, it could do so again. Unlike the “curbstoners” of a century ago, today’s underqualified agents are at least probably less scammy than they are naive. Instead of lurking in railroad stations, they are touting their roster of homes on TikTok, making real estate look far more effortless than it actually is.
