While massive turnover in the most common occupation (real estate agent) makes gauging the exact numbers difficult, data taken from Australia's Labour Market Information Portal (LMIP) provides a breakdown of the top 20 occupations in the Australian real estate industry (including the rental and hiring segments), as shown below and in the attached project spreadsheet.
THE TOP 20 OCCUPATIONS
According to Australia's Labour Market Information Portal (LMIP), the top 20 occupations in the rental, hiring, and real estate sector are: - Real Estate Sales Agents — 76,300
- General Clerks — 9,300
- Other Hospitality, Retail and Service Managers — 9,000
- Land Economists and Valuers — 7,200
- Office Managers — 7,100
- Receptionists — 6,400
- Advertising, Public Relations and Sales Managers — 4,700
- Accountants — 4,600
- Other Sales Assistants and Salespersons — 4,100
- Accounting Clerks — 3,400
- Finance Managers — 3,000
- Personal Assistants — 3,000
- Construction Managers — 2,800
- Information Officers — 2,700
- Metal Fitters and Machinists — 2,400
- Bookkeepers — 2,400
- Commercial Cleaners — 2,400
- Truck Drivers — 2,300
- Contract, Program, and Project Administrators — 2,300
- Advertising and Marketing Professionals — 2,200
Altogether, these ten positions employ 157,600 persons, or about 73.4% of the total labor market of 214,600 persons or 95.6% of the 164,900 full-time rent, hiring, and real estate employees. Based on the fact that the last four positions comprise relatively few individuals, we suspect that the 11th through 20th top jobs would we increasingly niche positions, though without official data we are unable to confirm this hypothesis.
RESEARCH STRATEGY
As noted in our previous report, there is a discrepancy in the total employment figures in Australia's "Rental, Hiring, and Real Estates Services" market even within the government's official Labour Market Information Portal (LMIP): The raw data charts (pulled into a project spreadsheet for convenience) indicate that there are 259,600 people employed in the industry, 164,900 of them full-time, while a statement on a separate page within the site states that the total number employed is only 214,600 persons. Since the latter figure is associated with the data which would enable us to identify the top ten industry jobs, we dug in deeper to understand the underlying data, as detailed in our other report.
In the course of digging deeper, we discovered a table with the top 20 jobs associated with this industry. This not only provided us with a more extensive list (see our findings above) but also demonstrated that the top 20 positions, which flatten out considerably in the less common jobs, comprise 157,600 jobs total (see the "Top 20 Jobs" tab of our project spreadsheet). Given how close this is to the 164,900 full-time jobs in this industry, we understand this list of top jobs to either encompass only full-time employment or else to encompass only some part-time personnel (perhaps those who reach a certain hour-per-week threshold).
While this provided an answer, we were not completely satisfied with our inability to authoritatively explain the difference in numbers given by the same source. We attempted to dig yet deeper into the data. Here we were stymied by a formatting issue. The "Australia Occupation Summary" and "Main Employing Occupations" tables provided their data only in the form of macro-enabled results tabs, with the underlying data tables hidden and password-locked. This prevented us from pulling the raw data and performing our pivots and analysis.
As a final effort to provide as complete and unified data as possible, we searched for third-party sources and/or commentary which might explain how these differences in the data came about. This led us to Australia's official Job Outlook page for real estate agents, which provided some salient details:
- The number of people employed as "their main job" in this position is expected to grow from 90,800 in 2018 to 97,400 by 2023.
- In that same period, there are expected to be 58,000 job openings, mostly due to high turnover.
- 80% of real estate agents are full-time, compared to an average of 66% working full-time in the general population.
That latter figure contradicts the raw data from the LMIP (see the "Distribution by State (Pivot)" tab), which puts the total full-time occupancy at 63.5% across the whole industry--far less than we would expect, with agents being by far the most common occupation and having an exceedingly high full-time employment status. However, this might easily be explained by the incredibly high turnover rate real estate agents face, as might the discrepancies between sources even within the LMIP database.
To summarize, we hypothesize that the different numbers coming from the LMIP are due to the industry's largest occupation segment fluctuating to such a high degree; basically, two surveys conducted even months apart might come up with very different numbers.
That being the case, we have not attempted to compensate for these (possible) fluctuations in the data, but have presented the top 20 occupations in the rental, hiring, and real estate services industry provided by the LMIP as-is.