INDUSTRY NEWSNEWS

Australians of real estate

Census 2016 told us what the average Australian looked like: a 38-year-old married female (with kids), born in Australia, who spends somewhere between five and 14 hours per week on domestic duties.

With the release of new ABS 2016 Census data showing occupational details1, we now have a view of how the data depicts an average worker in the real estate industry.

The debate is finally over.

If you imagined the average person in real estate to be a man in his 20s working 40 hours a week and taking home $1 million-plus a year, you couldn’t be further from the truth. There are many big hitters in the industry, but it’s far from the norm.

The data shows the average is most likely a woman in her 30s, working in the city and earning about $58,468.

She is mostly likely married, spends up to 40 hours per week working and combines this with unpaid domestic work and childcare.

Across our large, sunburnt country there are 109,930 employed in real estate services.

Of that number 62,523 or 56.88 per cent are women and 47,415 or 43.13 per cent are men.

Two-thirds of industry employees are under age 50, with most, 24,823, aged 30 to 39.

A further 24,486 are in their 40s, while 24,144 are in their 20s.

Startlingly, there are still 30 industry participants aged between 90 and 99. That’s a good innings in anyone’s language.

The overwhelming majority of industry employees work in cities, with 79.60 percent in metropolitan areas compared to 20.40 in regional Australia.

The pattern for which state most work in follows capital city population data, with 37,703 agents in NSW, 25,916 in Victoria and 25,274 in Queensland.

There’s then a drastic drop to the 11,440 real estate workers in Western Australia.

When it comes to salary, you might want to make a move to the ACT where the average worker takes home $83,462, which is almost $10,000 more than their NSW counterparts who earn an average of $73,828.

Country-wide the average wage is $71,724, with men averaging $89,239 and women significantly lower at $58,468.

However, the figures also showed that men are more likely to work longer hours.

While 26 per cent of women and 15 per cent of men worked 35 to 40 hours per week, 15 per cent of men and only 7 per cent of women worked more than 49 hours.

This correlates with the statistics that show that 17 per cent of women work part-time while just 6 per cent of men do.

There’s an even spread of men and women making up the figures for the number of sales agents at 30 per cent apiece.

The numbers of those in management are also close, with 10 per cent of men in management roles and 8 per cent of women in such positions.

However, women are more likely to work in administration than men, with 20 per cent compared to 3 per cent respectively.

When not working, women are also caring for children, both their own and others, more than men, with 21.83 per cent doing so compared to 14.97 per cent of male agents.

Women also do more unpaid domestic work with 22.40 per cent completing between five and 14 hours at home compared to 13.47 per cent of men.

A further 9.33 per cent of women do 15 to 29 hours unpaid domestic work compared to 2.29 per cent of men, and 4.38 per cent of women do more than 30 hours work in the home compared to 0.57 per cent of men.

More than half of industry workers, (53.96 per cent) are married, while 31.83 per cent have never married, 9.75 per cent are divorced and 3.33 per cent said they were separated.

Source
1. Analysis based on data class 6720 Real Estate Services. This class consists of units mainly engaged in valuing, purchasing, selling (by auction or private treaty), managing or renting real estate for others. Primary activities: Broking service (real estate), Real estate agency service, Real estate auctioning service, Real estate management service, Real estate rental agency service, Time share apartment management service, Valuing service (real estate).
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