Here we look at the number of establishments and employees for all real estate offices in Alameda County, California. This analysis has three sections:

1. The first section deals with examining the trend for growth for real estate offices in the target market for the past decade.
2. The second section deals with examining the trend for the total number of employees that are reported officially as working in the these establishments over the same time period.
3. The third section is a calculation that is arrived at by dividing the total number of employees in real estate office establishments in Alameda County by the totalnumber of establishments - the result of course is the average number of employees per real estate office establishment over the same time period.

In the first part of this analysis when we examine the total number of real estate office establishments in Alameda County, we find that while there were 353 establishments in the year 2001 when the realty business was healthy, and then later that number grew to 550 establishments in the year 2006 at the height of the real estate boom, that number has declined to 391 as of the year 2009. Clearly this decline can be explained in the fact that the real estate business has slowed considerably and the cost of maintain licenses and offices has also increased resulting in many shops deciding to either put their licenses on ice or leaving the business completely. From the height of the real estate boom in 2006, there has been a drop of over 25% in the number of real estate office establishments as per our analysis.

The second part of our analysis deals with the total number of employees in the real estate office establishments of Alameda County. Here we find a very interesting divergence from our prior analysis of the total number of real estate establishments. Our visuals will show that the from 2001 the total number of employees working in real estate establishments in Alameda County, increased until the year 2006 and after than there was a steep fall in the total number of employees being employed by these establishments. The numbers tell the story - in the year 2001 there were 1,471 employees working in real estate office establishments and by 2006 that number had grown to 3,309 representing an increase of 125%. Between 2006 and 2010 however, we find that the total number of employees working for real estate office establishments dropped 61% - an extremely steep decline given that the drop in the number of establishments was 25% as established by our earlier analysis. Clearly, during the heydays of the real estate business, real estate offices hired realtors and administrative staff to be able to meet the demand of the local market; later as the market slowed dramatically after the recession in 2008, these very employers were forced to lay off the folks that they had hired and even more to be able to stay in business.

The third and final piece of this analysis looks at the number of employees in real estate office establishments of Alameda County over the same period. This analysis if of course conducted by simply dividing the total number of employees by the total number of establishments for each year. The results of this analysis complement our conclusions reached from the analysis of the second section. In 2001 there were 4.17 employees on average for each real estate office in Alameda County. By 2006 this number had grown to 6.02 employees and by 2010 there were only 3.24 employees on average for each real estate office in the County reflecting the much smaller scale of real estate operations.

Quick Links:

1. Go to the Corresponding Template section for this industry.
2. Go to the Corresponding Questionnaire section for this industry.