The Boston Globe reports:
Mike Dulock wanted to leave his family's seafood business and revolutionize the real estate industry, so he took a few classes and got his real estate license.
Then he got real.
After earning less than $20,000 during his six months as a full-time agent, Dulock is back shivering before dawn each weekday on the Boston Fish Pier. Instead of showing houses, he's balancing the books at Sunny's Seafood, shaving the scales off 4-pound striped bass, or handling packs of Vietnamese black tiger shrimp. Like many latecomers to the state's now-fizzling real estate boom, his climb up the property ladder was brief.
''I discovered it was more lucrative to work for the family business," said Dulock, 32, of Methuen, who sold real estate until March 2005 for ERA Millennium Realty in Lynn, Everett, Malden, and Danvers. ''I'll always renew my real estate license and help family and friends who are buying or selling property, but it's not something I will ever pursue again as a career."
and
''For every four people who become an agent, only one survives in the business long enough to renew their license the second year," said Josee Kantak, a veteran agent at Carlson GMAC in Newburyport. ''A lot of people think they'll be good at selling real estate because they like looking at homes, but that's not really what this business is about."
This is a significant article.Another signal that the top in real estate is here for at least a while in the Boston area.Which isn't suprising when Massachusetts was the only state to lose population two years in a row according to census estimates.So,economic fundamentals suggest that speculators would have to be picking up the slack to keep prices up in Massachusetts.Real estate agents there feel the affects of artificial and declining demand.
