Membership in the National Association of Realtors can swing pretty wildly. Lots of people get into real estate when times are good, and leave when they’re bad.
During the housing boom, NAR picked up nearly 600,000 members, with the Realtor ranks growing from 800,000 to an all-time record of 1.37 million in October 2006.
After plunging back below the 1 million mark in 2012, Realtor membership is again on the rise. But so is the U.S. workforce as a whole. So maybe the question to ask is not how many people are Realtors, but what percentage of the total workforce is typically made up of Realtors?
NAR research economist Danielle Hale says that since 1980, Realtors have made up 0.7 percent of the total workforce, on average. That’s about where things stand now — meaning that from here on out, NAR expects the number of Realtors “to grow at roughly the same pace as the number of employed persons.”
Give or take a few hundred thou. Source: realtor.org.