Dirty Deep Dive: Fun with TREC license data
Looking at real estate license data in Texas
Howdy to all of my deep divers and fellow epic real estate nerds. On this Sunday the Funday I present to you: Fun with TREC license data.
This post is perhaps especially relevant for all of my fellow Texas real estate licensees out there. You might wonder why your email box is always so full of new and exciting SPAM. I wondered about this very thing. Self, I thought, someone at TREC (Texas Real Estate Commission) or NAR (National Association of Realtors) must be selling my email to the highest bidder. Oh, naive me. I then found out that the truth is much more interesting (some of you more knowledgeable and experienced agents no doubt giggle at this rookie’s discovery).
The answer, fellow traveller, is that due to passage of Texas Senate Bill 701 (passed in 2011), the data for each and every single real estate licensee in Texas is available in spreadsheet form and for immediate and convenient download on the internet: TREC high value data sets. At first I was horrified. Then, I quickly went through all stages of grief to finally arrive at quiet resignation and acceptance (it took me about 5 minutes to go through the process). Dear reader, strive for privacy as we might, I just don’t think it is much of a reality anymore. There is little in the way of basic, personal information (e.g. cell phone number, address) that is not available on the internet for anyone motivated enough to find it. Struggling too hard against the quicksand of the Information Age only invites you to be pulled down that much faster (read about the Streisand Effect).
Quickly after picking myself off of the floor I realized that this trove of data is, well… it is a treasure. Yes, fellow nerds, a treasure trove of information just waiting to be analyzed. And like a Dirty nerdy computer pirate, I got down to the business of counting my booty. I imagined all manner of ways to torture the data to reveal its secrets. The following is what I found, but first…
Data Disclaimer
The analyses contained below are based on Dirty Data. That is to say that I pulled the data directly from the TREC website and did absolutely no work to verify their veracity. Considering that these data came from a government organization, it is imperative to take it all with a grain of salt. In fact, I even noticed that some of the license entries were duplicated. And I did not correct for it. So right there we know that none of this is conclusive. BUT! - it is true enough to be interesting. As a former employee of two, different government organizations, I am fond of the old adage: Good enough for government work. Now let’s get Dirty.
Not for all the real estate licenses in Texas…
So just how many active real estate licenses exist in Texas? Keeping in mind the fuzziness of the data as described in the disclaimer above, the number stands somewhere around 178,451. That number represents only active licenses and only for individual agents and brokers. If we count Inactive licenses, we climb to 214,355 (-ish). That is a lot of real estate licenses. The estimated population for the State of Texas for 2021 is 29,527,941 which means that there are about 165 Texas residents for every licensed agent. Data from the US Census Bureau tells us that about 62% of Texas residents are homeowners which brings that number down to 102. And most of those are formed into households so we’ll chop that down another 50%. So we can surmise that of the 165 residents allotted to each license, there are only 51 homes per license available across the state. And how many of them are actually ready to sell today? Or buy?
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