the single commission salary?

I have noticed a number of very expensive high end homes coming up on the market in our area lately - I'm talking million dollar homes. Most are tucked away on some lake front acreage somewhere in the mountains. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to act as the real estate agent for one of these homes. Let's say a home is selling for $1.2 million. At an average commission rate of 7% (of which the selling and buyer's agent would each get half), you could walk away making $42,000. Can you believe that? For one sale!

Even if you have to hold their hands every minute of the day (which you should be more than willing to do for that type of commission), you could essentially sell that one home and take the rest of the year off. With the low cost of internet advertising, you could easily throw $5k into marketing the property and probably sell it in a month or so, and still walk away with a heck of a profit for only a month's work of work. What an amazing world we live in. The only problem is that to be a successful real estate agent and get high profile properties like that, you probably need to be constantly active in the market. It's a catch 22.