I was interviewing for a job right out of college at a financial institution.
It went okay but I never got called back for a second interview. A friend applied for the same role and made the second round of interviews. He eventually got a job in the training program.
I asked him how he made it through.
My brother was friends with one of the hiring managers. I got lucky.
Luck plays a bigger role in your career path than most successful people are willing to admit.
I often think about all of the forks in the road in my career. All of the jobs I didn’t get. Things that broke perfectly. Things that didn’t go as planned.
What if I would have got that one job in Chicago?
What if I never sent Josh that email?
What if I was in a different industry? Or I came into this one at the wrong time?
What if I never started my blog?
You can make your own luck through hard work of course but so much of it can be based on timing and place.
You control what you control but sometimes things outside of your control grab the steering wheel.
Think about working in the real estate market this decade.
A pandemic sent mortgage rates from already low levels to the floor. Housing activity exploded because people reassessed their lifestyle during the lockdowns.
All the government spending and supply chain shocks caused the highest inflation in four decades. The Fed jacked up rates to fight it. Mortgage rates went from sub-3% to as high as 8%. They’ve now been above 6% since the fall of 2022.
So we’ve now seen a Great Financial Crisis-level of home sales for three-plus years:
We went from a booming home sales market to a recession in the blink of an eye.
Think about people working in the housing market. Loan officers were processing an insane amount of loans because of all the activity and refinancing going on in the early-2020s.
Houses were selling sight unseen with no contingencies and multiple bids above the list price. For many it was likely the best business environment of their lifetime.
Not because of anything they did. It was just the environment.
Now we’ve gone the other direction.
The Wall Street Journal had a recent story that explains how the housing recession is impacting those who work in the industry:
Here’s the lede:
Kim Taylor bet her career on the housing market.
In mid-2023, the real-estate agent launched her own brokerage with her husband, Gordon Taylor. The market in the Fort Worth, Texas, area had cooled from its pandemic-era frenzy, but business was good. Taylor started out with a team of seven agents and quickly brought six more onboard.
By 2024, high mortgage rates and prices were weighing on demand, and homes sat on the market. Most of Taylor’s agents had to find other part-time or full-time jobs to stay afloat. Her husband took a job last year working for a school district.
“We just became a bleeding artery,” said Taylor, who started working in real estate in 2015. “The last 11 months have been the hardest of my career.” She closed the brokerage this spring and joined another firm.
They are not alone.
Realtors are having to get other jobs on the side to survive:
About 71% of agents surveyed by NAR in 2025 said real estate was their only profession, the lowest proportion on record in survey data going back to 2005.
The average agent isn’t making a ton of money:
The typical agent with two years of experience or less did three transactions in 2024 and earned $8,100 in gross income from real estate, according to the NAR survey. The typical agent of any experience level completed 10 transactions in 2024 and earned $58,100 in gross income, the survey said.
Employment in the space is in a freefall:
Mortgage-industry employment has declined almost 40% from its peak in 2021, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data compiled by the Mortgage Bankers Association.
I feel for these people.
They didn’t personally cause the boom or the bust. It’s bad luck.
It’s important to remember sometimes forces outside of your control can dictate your business results and career experience.
Further Reading:
Will Housing Prices Finally Fall in 2026?
