Frothy reality television shows like “Selling Sunset” and “Buying Beverly Hills” may make it seem otherwise, but the average real estate agent in the United States is not pulling up to open houses in a Lamborghini and navigating the cobblestone pathway to the front door in Louboutin heels.
In fact, one makes around $50,000 a year, according to the National Association of Realtors. And each year, nearly half of the more than three million licensed agents sell only one property — or no houses at all — according to the Consumer Federation of America.
Real estate — a field with few benefits for agents and a cutthroat sales model — can be a high-stakes game. For most, the payoff is meager. For a select few though, real estate has offered an exclusive off-ramp, taking them from pennies to penthouses.
But even these agents say their reality is nothing like the stories spun on TV. Here are three of them.
An ‘Underdog’ No More
How it started: Sere Conde came to New York City from Zambia at 29 and folded T-shirts at Gap to pay the bills.
How it’s going: She recently sold a two-bedroom apartment at 277 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan for $6.5 million, and estimates she has sold almost $300 million worth of real estate in the last three years.
Ms. Conde, 50, was born in Guinea and raised in Ivory Coast. When she was 7, her parents moved to Zambia to try to make money in the mining industry, leaving her and her three siblings behind with their grandmother. Her parents later brought her to Zambia to finish school.
She dreamed of going into business in America. To save up, she went to the market on weekends and combed through secondhand clothes that had been donated by Americans, selecting the nicest items, paying for them to be dry cleaned and then reselling them at a profit. After about three months, she had made about $2,000.
So in 1994, at age 21, she moved to New York and lived with an aunt until she got on her feet, juggling a string of retail jobs at stores like Sephora and Gap while caring for her daughter, who was born in 1999. She eventually found herself behind the Clinique counter at Macy’s, where customers told her she had a knack for sales and should try real estate.
She decided to go for it and enrolled in online real estate classes in 2020, as the market was going crazy at the height of the coronavirus pandemic.
Four months in, she was already one of the top earners at her brokerage. “I was hungry,” she said. Then in 2022, she joined Douglas Elliman’s Eklund Gomes team, run by the celebrity agents Fredrik Eklund and John Gomes.
She now regularly closes million-dollar deals, and is focused on growing her social media accounts.
“I want to be known among wealthy Black people,” she said. “I want them to know who I am so they can buy from me.”
“I’m a real underdog,” she added. “And I would like the Robert Smiths of the world to know who Sere Conde is,” she said, referring to the private equity billionaire.
Selling Houses After Building Them
How it started: Carl Gambino was walking dogs and working in construction when he learned more about real estate.
How it’s going: Mr. Gambino, 40, has sold more than $2.5 billion in real estate since 2015.
Carl Gambino is as native of a New Yorker as they get. He was born in SoHo to a tight-knit Italian family. His grandmothers, who are both in their 90s, still live in the same apartment building; his parents met on the stairs there when they were just 8 years old.
In his teens and early 20s, he fell into drug and alcohol addiction, overdosing a few times. And for a few years, there were days when he wasn’t sure he would live.
“It was an accomplishment just to be a functional human,” he said.
His life turned around when, in October 2008, he met Sarah Ivory, the woman who would become his wife, at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. They moved to Los Angeles, and he started working construction jobs for $15 an hour. In his free time, he read self-help books and, for extra money, walked dogs in Hollywood.
A developer on one of the homes he was working on introduced him to Kurt Rappaport, the celebrity real estate agent who counts Beyoncé and Jay-Z among his clients.
Mr. Rappaport encouraged Mr. Gambino to get his California real estate license. But he knew he wouldn’t make money unless he had clients. So he tapped a network that already trusted him — with their pets.
“I started to pursue my dog walking clients and try to get them to let me sell their houses,” Mr. Gambino said. “Some of them would laugh.”
But he was persistent. One of his first big sales was for one of his dog walking clients: Mr. Gambino sold him a $6 million house, earning enough in commission to pay off most of his debts, which included tax bills, credit cards and Ms. Ivory’s student loans. Even the parking tickets for his blue Chevy Cruze, which had been sitting on bricks outside his rent-controlled apartment after someone had stolen the tires off the vehicle, could finally be paid off.
His clients often have multiple homes in different cities. So he is now licensed in five states, and his client list includes Mark Wahlberg and Harry Styles.
He and Ms. Ivory now have two children and are now back in New York. He’s now writing his own self-help book.
From Cold Calling to a Celebrity Client List
How it started: When Santiago Arana came to the United States, he slept on a family member’s couch, worked as a busboy during the day and took English-language classes at night.
How it’s going: He has $5 billion in sales, and his clients include Ben Affleck, Lady Gaga and LeBron James.
In May 2003, as political unrest gripped his native Tarija, Bolivia, Mr. Arana learned that he had earned a scholarship to study finance in the United States. But the course was taught in English, and he knew only a handful of words. So he flew to Santa Barbara, Calif., where a family member offered him a couch for a few months while he learned the language.
“I had $120,” he said of the day he arrived. “Which in Bolivia was a decent amount of money, but I realized as soon as I came here that it wasn’t the same.”
He bused tables at a high-end restaurant nearby, in wealthy Montecito. And when his shifts ended, he headed to English-language classes. As his language skills improved, he was promoted to a waiter position.
After a cousin suggested he get his real estate license, Mr. Arana began working with Keller Williams in Beverly Hills, having abandoned the idea of attaining a finance degree, and leaned on cold calls and door knocking to find clients. But for nearly three years, he struck out. At night, he continued to wait tables.
Then, in 2008, the financial crisis crashed markets around him. He found himself parked outside yet another restaurant, applying for yet another waiter role, and considered quitting real estate all together.
But networking in the Spanish-speaking real estate community in Los Angeles helped him. He reached out Rodrigo Iglesias, a celebrity agent originally from Argentina, who eventually offered him a role on his team at Sotheby’s.
He also offered some advice: “It’s not what we do, but how we do it.” Mr. Arana, 45, took those words to heart.
“It’s really about the law of attraction,” he said. “It all comes down really to your mind and your mind-set and what you’re capable of doing.”
In 2013, Mr. Arana became a partner at the Agency, the luxury brokerage founded by the Mexico City-born celebrity agent Mauricio Umansky. He now pulls in hundreds of millions of dollars worth of real estate sales each year, and has a celebrity client list that reads like a front-row table at the Golden Globes.
“The reality is that I’m grateful,” he said. “The American dream did exist for me.”
