Roughly 1 in 50 Californians is a Realtor

This article is from late May, but it's astounding. 1 in 52 adults in California is a realtor (agent or broker). And as of the first half of this year, 2007, the numbers are still increasing... talk about a lagging indicator.

I looked up the stats on population in Wikipedia. California has 36.5M people. So assuming 1 in 52 adults is in this industry, backing that back into the total population that means of the 36.5M people in California 24.75M are adults or 68%. Why did I do that? Just curious how it compares nationally.

There are 1.3 million members of the National Association of Realtors (pure agents). Of those about 390K are in CA. Of 24.75M people in CA, 390K are realtors or 1.57% of the adult population.

The rest of the country has a population of 270M, assuming 68% are adults that is 184M adults.

So take out the 390K CA realtors out of the 1.3M total and that leaves you with 910K realtors for the other 49 states or 184M adults. Or 0.5% of the adult population.

So takeaway #1, CA has triple the number of people, as a % of population, who can be classified as a realtor (how many are active vs inactive could be a question), versus the rest of the nation.

Takeaway #2, 1 in every 200 Americans adults is a realtor (or at least has a license). That doesn't include the brokers. So you don't think the employment picture will be affected nationwide by this real estate issue?

Now this is back of envelope analysis, working backward and I don't have independent confirmation but mostly I wanted to see how the 1 in 52 number compares in CA versus the rest of the nation. Keep in mind, as an economy, if CA was a stand alone economy it would be the 7th largest in the world. So a slowdown there effects us all. They have a major gravitational pull.