How many real estate agents are there globally? We estimate that there are 4 to 6 million professionals worldwide.
“The numbers are likely 4 to 6 million professionals worldwide, but no official data on this exists, nor is it easily attainable. Why? Many countries do not have real estate license laws, so since the profession is so unregulated internationally, getting any true data is difficult.”
Nar.Realtor – Jeff Hornberger
However, what do we know? Well, we do know that United States, China, Brazil and Europe are the biggest real estate markets. Indeed, more than 3 million real estate agents work in these countries:
- United States 2 million
- China 500,000
- Brazil 300,000
- Europe 250,000
- Canada 100,000
- Australia 65,000
How can there be 2 million real estate agents in the United States? Well, because more than 5 million homes are sold each year. Therefore, over 86,000 real estate brokerage firms operate in the country.
Source: nar.realtor, IBISworld, REIA
United States – 2 million real estate agents
There are about 2 million people holding real estate licenses, and about 1.4 million of them belong to NAR (source). Actually the National Association of Realtors provides an update on this number each month (click here).
Europe – number of agents per country
- Spain 136,000
- France 100,000
- Portugal 55,000
- UK 21,000
Note: How can the UK count only 21,000 real estate agents? This number seems wrong, as every year around 1.2 million homes are sold across the UK (Statista). Hence, with a number of transactions per year similar to France (1 million homes sold in 2019 – Notaires), how can the number of estate agents be so small? Well, another source (Statista) mentions 219,000 high street agents and 19,000 online agents. Yet another source mentions 2,600 estate agents in London. Therefore, you can see why trying to determine how many estate agents there are globally is a difficult exercise. In the end, we decided to trust propertyindustryeye’s figure.
Sources: propertyindustryeye & independent.co.uk & statista & standard.co.uk, FBW, ABC.es, FBW