Time Machine

Real estate brokers

Name: Real Estate Brokers: employment and wages since 1908
Creator: Future History
License: https://futurehistory.earth/terms

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 46,100 US real estate brokers, with median pay of $73,220 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2003, the highest was 52,310, in May 2022. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 1,646 from 1908, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for real estate brokers: iBuying algorithms, 2018 to 2021.

Official statistic: latest count and pay, highest count.Researched context: earliest figure.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects employment to change +0.8% from 2025 to 2035.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

Official statistic

AI exposure studies

42.2% of this job's tasks are exposed to large language models. Not a forecast of job losses. Eloundou and others, 2023 Official statistic

Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. BLS publishes these counts as yearly survey snapshots and cautions against reading them as a precise trend. In May 2021 BLS changed how it estimates these counts (a model-based method using three years of survey data) and moved fully to the 2018 occupation codes, so part of a change across 2021 can come from the method rather than the work.

Last updated 11 October 2026.

Cite this page

APA

Future History. (2026, October 11). Real estate brokers: jobs and pay since 1908 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/41-9021

Chicago

Future History. "Real estate brokers: jobs and pay since 1908." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/41-9021.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_41_9021, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Real estate brokers: jobs and pay since 1908}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/41-9021}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }

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1850187519001925195019752000now

2026

Known then as Real Estate Dealer / Land Agent / Curbstoner (unlicensed era)

Known then as Real Estate Agent / REALTOR member (NAR founding era, still unlicensed in most states)

Known then as Licensed Real Estate Broker / REALTOR (post-licensing, NAREB era)

Known then as Real Estate Broker / REALTOR (NAR modern name, pre-SOC-split era)

Known then as Real Estate Brokers (BLS SOC 41-9021, separated from Sales Agents 41-9022)

Known today as Real Estate Brokers (BLS SOC 41-9021, separated from Sales Agents 41-9022)

Projected to still be called Real Estate Brokers (BLS SOC 41-9021, separated from Sales Agents 41-9022)

Data from the May 2025 survey

US Employment

46K

Est.

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic

Report an error

Median Annual Wage

$73,220

≈ $71,343 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic

Report an error

Beat · 1885

The San Diego Real Estate Board establishes the first known multiple listing service in the United States: member brokers write their active listings on cards and send runners through the city twice daily to distribute updated lists to other member offices. The underlying idea, that an organized system of cooperative listings benefits all brokers by expanding the pool of potential matches, will govern the industry's structure for the next 140 years. The MLS is both the profession's greatest enabler and, once the internet made its contents public in 1996, the source of its most significant vulnerability.

Beat · 1908

May 12, 1908: 120 founding members and 19 real estate boards establish the National Association of Real Estate Exchanges in Chicago. The organization aims to standardize practices, promote ethical behavior, and provide education and resources for real estate professionals. By the end of its first year it had 1,646 members. The Code of Ethics follows in 1913 (adopting the Golden Rule as its organizing principle), and in 1916 Minneapolis board past-president Charles N. Chadbourn coins the term "REALTOR" to identify members committed to ethical standards and distinguish them from unregulated "curbstoners."

Beat · 1919

California enacts the Real Estate Act of 1919, the first state law to survive Supreme Court review requiring real estate brokers and salespersons to hold a state-issued license. (An earlier 1917 California licensing law was struck down as unconstitutional.) The 1919 act creates the State Real Estate Department and establishes the two-tier structure that persists today: salespersons work under a broker's license; brokers pass a more rigorous exam and are personally responsible for their brokerage operations. Other states follow quickly; by the late 1920s the licensing structure exists in most states, giving "real estate broker" the distinct legal status it has held ever since.

Beat · 1944

The Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944 (GI Bill) includes Veterans Administration home loan guarantees that allow returning WWII veterans to purchase homes with no down payment at low fixed interest rates. The VA mortgage guarantee, combined with Federal Housing Administration (FHA) insurance introduced in 1934, fuels a suburban housing boom that makes professional brokerage the organizing layer of the largest mass-market expansion of homeownership in American history. By 1950, for the first time, more than half of all Americans own their homes. This era also sees women enter real estate brokerage in substantial numbers, with female realtors positioning residential sales as a natural extension of "guardianship of the home" and creating a female professional domain within what had been a male-dominated field.

Beat · 1972

The National Association of Real Estate Boards formally renames itself the National Association of REALTORS (NAR). It has already become the largest trade association in the United States by the early 1970s, with membership exceeding 100,000 and growing rapidly as the Baby Boom generation enters household formation age. NAR's consistent political influence over federal housing finance policy (FHA, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac), mortgage interest deductibility, and capital gains exclusions for home sales gives the organized brokerage profession extraordinary structural protection -- many of the tax and finance incentives that sustain demand for residential real estate brokerage are lobbied into existence by the same trade association that brokers join.

Beat · 2005

NAR membership reaches 1,271,057 in November 2005, its all-time peak, reflecting the height of the mid-2000s housing boom. US median home prices had doubled between 1997 and 2005; total existing home sales reached 7.08 million in 2005, a record that still stood in 2025. The low barrier to entry for a real estate license (requirements vary by state but are generally less demanding than a cosmetology license in most states) means that housing booms attract large numbers of part-time and opportunistic entrants; the profession swells during booms and contracts during downturns. The 2005 membership peak preceded the housing crash by roughly 18 months.

Beat · 2021

November 8, 2021: Zillow announces the closure of Zillow Offers, its iBuying unit, after taking $569 million in write-downs on its home inventory -- roughly $30,000 per home. CEO Rich Barton: "The unpredictability in forecasting home prices far exceeds what we anticipated." Zillow lays off approximately 25% of its workforce. The Zillow Offers collapse follows a similar retreat by Redfin (RedfinNow, closed 2022) and a major contraction at Opendoor. The iBuying experiment's failure is significant for the brokerage profession: the best-funded, most technologically sophisticated attempt to automate the real estate transaction proved unable to solve the adverse-selection and home-condition-valuation problems that experienced human brokers navigate through local knowledge, network, and physical inspection.

Beat · 2024

March 15, 2024: NAR announces a $418 million settlement in the Sitzer/Burnett antitrust case, in which a Missouri jury had found NAR and major brokerages liable for colluding to artificially inflate commissions (October 2023 verdict). Effective August 17, 2024, two major practice changes apply: (1) MLS platforms may no longer display offers of buyer-agent compensation, eliminating the convention of the seller paying both agents' commissions as part of the transaction; (2) buyers' agents must have a signed written compensation agreement with buyers before showing properties. The settlement is the most significant structural change to the US real estate commission convention since NAR formalized the MLS cooperation model in the 1950s. Early data (Redfin, October 2024) shows buyer-agent commissions at 2.34%, barely changed from 2.35% pre-settlement, suggesting the market transition is gradual.

How to read this number

OEWS is a point-in-time survey snapshot, not a continuous time series; BLS advises against using it for year-over-year trend comparison.

Each dot is a cited figure over time; the dotted line only links them (values between aren't measured). Hollow dots are estimates.

Official statistic: Copied by a script from a statistics agency table or a published study's table, not retyped by hand. BLS figures, ONS ASHE figures (UK pay and jobs) and the forecast and exposure tables are also re-checked against that table on every data run. Researched context: Researched from the cited source rather than copied from it by a script, so it is not machine-checked yet. Spot a mistake? Each figure has a “Report an error” link.

How it began · 1850

By the 1850s, American cities had grown large enough that buying or selling a house without an intermediary had become genuinely difficult: buyers and sellers in a city of 500,000 could not find each other without help, and property law had grown complex enough that a knowledgeable guide was worth paying for. The earliest US real estate dealers operated out of offices in commercial districts, posting handbills and maintaining informal networks with other dealers. They were called "land agents" in the agricultural West, where vast federal land grants were being surveyed and sold, and "real estate dealers" in the industrializing Northeast. There was no licensing requirement, no professional code, and no organization. Anyone with a desk and a persuasive manner could call himself a broker. The first formal attempt to organize the profession came not from a desire to protect the public but from a desire to protect brokers from each other: in 1885, the San Diego Real Estate Board established the first known multiple listing service, a system by which member brokers shared their property lists twice daily via runners, so that any member's buyer could be matched to any member's seller. The logic was purely commercial: shared inventory meant more closed transactions. By 1908, when 120 founding members established the National Association of Real Estate Exchanges in Chicago, there were enough practicing dealers across enough cities that national standardization seemed both possible and profitable. That 1908 meeting, the direct ancestor of today's National Association of REALTORS, is the credible founding moment of the organized profession. The 1919 California Real Estate Act, upheld by the state Supreme Court and soon imitated by nearly every other state, added the element that made "broker" a distinct legal status: a state-issued license, an examination, and a requirement that agents work under a licensed broker's supervision.

Cited forecasts · present → 2035

Will AI replace real estate brokers? What the research says

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than an average.

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, the spread is the honest signal.

What published forecasts say

Forecast change in the number of people doing this work, as published by each named source. Bars share one scale on every role, centred on zero and reaching the end at ±30%. Grey marks a small change, 3% or less either way.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35
Target year 2035
+0.8%
BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 41-9021 (Real estate brokers): 103.5 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 104.3 thousand in 2035, a change of +0.8 thousand (+0.8%). Matrix employment counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers (54.9% of this occupation in 2025). The average for all occupations in this cycle is +3.5%.
Official statisticReport an error

How exposed is this work to AI (research measures)

Scores as published by each study. Each row says what it measures. These measure what AI could technically do, not forecasts of jobs lost.

Eloundou et al. (2023), "GPTs are GPTs"
2023 study · Share of tasks exposed to LLMs (β, human-rated)
42.2%
of tasks
What this measures
Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 41-9021.00 Real Estate Brokers. Shown: human-rated β = 0.422, the share of the occupation's tasks an LLM could do in at least half the time at equal quality, counting tasks that need LLM-powered software at half weight (β = E1 + 0.5 × E2). Other published measures for this occupation: human-rated α (LLM alone) 0.125 and γ (all LLM-assisted) 0.719; GPT-4-rated β 0.5. This measures how much of the work an LLM could touch, not how many jobs disappear.
Official statisticReport an error

Today, in this role

What's changing day to day for real estate brokers

Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.

AI is sitting alongside you here Sell, for a fee, real estate owned by others

Sources^[2]

Where your edge is

AI is sitting alongside you here Obtain agreements from property owners to place properties…

for sale with real estate firms.^[2]

Where your edge is

AI is sitting alongside you here Act as an intermediary in negotiations between buyers…

and sellers over property prices and settlement details and during the closing of sales.^[2]

Where your edge is

Tools of the era

How has the work of real estate brokers changed since 1885?

The tools that defined the work, one line per era. Select an era to see how it reshaped the work.

Handwritten listing books + runners (the original MLS, 1885)
The San Diego Real Estate Board in 1885 established the first known multiple listing service: member brokers wrote their active listings on index cards and sent runners through the city twice daily to distribute updated lists to other brokerages. By 1910, Cook County (Chicago) displayed listings on a blackboard at biweekly meetings, later shifting to typewritten bulletins circulated to member offices. The broker's primary professional tool was the listing book: a binder updated weekly or bimonthly, containing address, price, bedroom count, and a brief description for every property on the local market. By 1922, many boards operated local MLSs. The broker who accumulated the most listings and the most local knowledge was the most valuable professional in the market. Information was physical, slow, and hoarded.
Effect on the work
The MLS book created a structural information barrier: only NAR member brokers with access to the listing book knew what was on the market. This exclusivity was the economic foundation of the profession for nearly a century, and it produced NAR's consistent political resistance to any technology that would make listings publicly accessible.
Photography + multilith printing in listing books (from 1925)
The New Jersey and Louisiana MLSs first incorporated photographs into property listings around 1925, adding a visual dimension to what had previously been text-only descriptions. By the 1950s, multilith machines (an offset printing technology precursor) enabled brokers to print listings with photos for distribution to buyers without requiring them to visit a property first. "You had to bring your clients into the office, pick up the book, go through the pages," as a later industry historian described it. The broker's office became the mandatory gateway to property search: photographs were broker-controlled assets and not publicly available. This era also saw the first model homes, debuting in Dallas in 1952, as a staged-property sales tool that brokers adopted for new construction marketing.
Computerized MLS terminals (dial-up, from 1975; NAR's RISCO software, 1981)
Computerized MLS systems became available in 1975 and quickly displaced the printed listing book in major metro markets. Computer terminals arrived in brokerage offices by the late 1970s, allowing agents to search properties by criteria rather than manually leafing through books. In 1981 NAR acquired RISCO MLS software, enabling brokers to filter properties by buyer criteria electronically. The effect on broker productivity was substantial: a search that took an agent an afternoon with the book could now be done in minutes. But crucially, access remained exclusively through broker terminals: buyers and sellers still had to go through a licensed broker to use the system. The information monopoly survived the computerization of its underlying database. CD-ROM players appeared at NAR's 1994 trade expo as an intermediate portable-listing format before internet access became universal.
Effect on the work
Computerized MLS reduced the time a broker spent matching buyers to listings, enabling individual brokers to manage more concurrent client relationships. Employment in the profession expanded dramatically in this era: NAR membership grew between 1970 and 1990, reflecting both the real estate booms of the era and the reduced time cost per transaction that technology provided.
Public internet MLS (Realtor.com 1996; Zillow 2006) -- the end of information exclusivity
The National Association of Realtors launched the Realtor Information Network (RIN) in 1994, initially restricted to NAR members only. It nearly went bankrupt and relaunched as a public property listing website (Realtor.com) in 1996, making MLS data publicly visible for the first time. Zillow launched on February 8, 2006, attracting over 1 million visitors in its first three days, with its Zestimate automated property valuation tool giving buyers and sellers a price estimate they had previously needed to hire a broker to obtain. Saul Klein, who helped create Realtor.com, described the broker's pre-internet value proposition starkly: "the value proposition of a realtor was that you knew what was for sale and nobody else knew." The internet eliminated that. Brokers in this era faced the most fundamental challenge to their value proposition in the profession's history, and responded by shifting their narrative toward transaction management, negotiation expertise, and the emotional complexity of the home-buying process as the things buyers could not replicate with a website.
Effect on the work
Despite the internet shattering the information monopoly, broker headcount did not collapse. NAR membership reached 1.27 million by November 2005 (its all-time peak) before the housing crash. The information disruption reallocated rather than eliminated broker work: from gatekeeper of listings to navigator of the transaction.
iBuying algorithms (Zillow Offers 2018; Opendoor; shut down by 2021)
Zillow launched Zillow Offers in 2018: a service that used AI-based valuation algorithms to make instant cash offers to homeowners, buy the property directly, renovate it, and resell it, removing the broker from the transaction entirely. Opendoor, founded 2014, pioneered the model. For real estate brokers this appeared to be the existential threat the internet had been forecast to be: a well-capitalized technology company was attempting to disintermediate the entire transaction. The experiment failed. Zillow took $569 million in write-downs in late 2021 and shut down Zillow Offers on November 8, 2021, because "the unpredictability in forecasting home prices far exceeds what we anticipated" (Zillow CEO Rich Barton). The core problem was what economists call the lemons problem: homeowners with well-maintained properties recognized they could get better prices on the open market and declined the algorithmic offer; homeowners with flawed properties eagerly accepted. The algorithm selected adversely against itself. Opendoor contracted sharply and Redfin's RedfinNow closed in 2022. The iBuying arc is the most instructive recent data point on the limits of algorithmic real estate: the transaction complexity that brokers navigate proved harder to automate than the technology assumed.
Effect on the work
iBuying at its peak (2021) represented about 1% of US home sales; its collapse validated the structural role of the broker in high-complexity, high-variance transactions. The broker workforce was not materially displaced during the iBuying era.
AI-assisted CRM + showing tools + commission-negotiation era (post-settlement)
As of 2026, the mainstream daily-driver toolkit for a US real estate broker is a cloud CRM (kvCORE, Follow Up Boss, BoomTown), an IDX-powered property search portal, Dotloop or DocuSign for digital transaction management, and Matterport 3D virtual tours for listing presentation. AI features are entering these platforms (Zillow launched ZillowPro, an AI-powered agent workflow product, with initial market launches in early 2026 and nationwide availability planned for mid-2026), but the market-moving disruption of the current era is regulatory rather than technological: the August 2024 implementation of the NAR commission-settlement practices (Sitzer/Burnett verdict, March 2024, $418 million settlement) eliminated the convention of bundling buyer-agent compensation into the seller-paid MLS listing. Brokers must now negotiate buyer-side fees explicitly with buyers before showing properties. Early data (Redfin, late 2024) shows average buyer-agent commissions declining modestly from 2.35% to 2.34%, but the longer-term structural effect on broker income and headcount is the defining open question as of 2026.

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Real Estate Brokers employment and pay by year

On record since1850

Latest US employment46,100 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error

Latest US median pay$73,220 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error

Outlook+0.8% by 2035Source: BLS Employment Projections 2025-35Official statisticReport an error

View all 28 years of cited US data, each linked to its source

Real Estate Brokers in the US: employment and pay by year, with sources
Year	US employment	Annual pay (median unless marked)	Source	Report
1908	1,646	n/a	Est., US DOJ / National Association of…[1] Researched context	Report
1950	43,503	n/a	Est., US DOJ / NAR membership history…[1] Researched context	Report
1970	94,625	n/a	Est., US DOJ / NAR membership history…[1] Researched context	Report
1990	810,607	n/a	Est., US DOJ / NAR membership history…[1] Researched context	Report
2000	766,560	n/a	Est., US DOJ / NAR membership history…[1] Researched context	Report
2003	40,590	$49,740	BLS OEWS May 2003 [2] Official statistic	Report
2004	40,050	$58,720	BLS OEWS May 2004 [2] Official statistic	Report
2005	41,760	$57,190	BLS OEWS May 2005 [2] Official statistic	Report
2006	46,950	$60,790	BLS OEWS May 2006 [2] Official statistic	Report
2007	49,270	$58,860	BLS OEWS May 2007 [2] Official statistic	Report
2008	51,390	$57,500	BLS OEWS May 2008 [2] Official statistic	Report
2009	48,380	$55,740	BLS OEWS May 2009 [2] Official statistic	Report
2010	41,210	$54,910	BLS OEWS May 2010 [2] Official statistic	Report
2011	38,200	$59,340	BLS OEWS May 2011 [2] Official statistic	Report
2012	37,270	$58,350	BLS OEWS May 2012 [2] Official statistic	Report
2013	38,970	$59,580	BLS OEWS May 2013 [2] Official statistic	Report
2014	38,720	$57,360	BLS OEWS May 2014 [2] Official statistic	Report
2015	38,810	$56,860	BLS OEWS May 2015 [2] Official statistic	Report
2016	40,850	$56,790	BLS OEWS May 2016 [2] Official statistic	Report
2017	40,530	$56,730	BLS OEWS May 2017 [2] Official statistic	Report
2018	40,320	$58,210	BLS OEWS May 2018 [2] Official statistic	Report
2019	42,730	$59,720	BLS OEWS May 2019 [2] Official statistic	Report
2020	44,610	$60,370	BLS OEWS May 2020 [2] Official statistic	Report
2021	48,460	$62,010	BLS OEWS May 2021 [2] Official statistic	Report
2022	52,310	$62,190	BLS OEWS May 2022 [2] Official statistic	Report
2023	51,350	$63,060	BLS OEWS May 2023 [2] Official statistic	Report
2024	49,590	$72,280	BLS OEWS May 2024 [2] Official statistic	Report
2025	46,100	$73,220	BLS OEWS May 2025 [2] Official statistic	Report

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Handwritten listing books + runners (the original MLS, 1885) (1885 to 1950)

Photography + multilith printing in listing books (from 1925) (1925 to 1975)

Computerized MLS terminals (dial-up, from 1975; NAR's RISCO software, 1981) (1975 to 1996)

Public internet MLS (Realtor.com 1996; Zillow 2006) -- the end of information exclusivity (1996 to 2010)

iBuying algorithms (Zillow Offers 2018; Opendoor; shut down by 2021) (2018 to 2021)

AI-assisted CRM + showing tools + commission-negotiation era (post-settlement) (2023 to present)

Real Estate Brokers employment and pay by year

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