A Glut in the Market for Homes

CUPERTINO, Calif. — Joseph Petralia is cold-calling Silicon Valley homeowners, politely inquiring whether they're planning to move anytime soon.

No? Well, he asks, how about the neighbors? Do you know them? Any of them thinking of leaving town?

The real estate agent waits a maximum of three rings for people to answer -- any more and he figures they'll be irritated at having to come to the phone. But even when they pick up, most promptly hang up. Sometimes they yell at him.

It's difficult, dispiriting work. But if the former auto parts salesman is serious about making it as an agent, he needs to find people who will let him sell their houses.

That's a formidable task. One of the few things increasing faster than house prices in California is the supply of agents licensed to sell them.

More than 22,000 applicants took the state's real estate exam in April, nearly three times as many as in April 2003, according to the Department of Real Estate. To handle the surge, the department has rented six test centers around the state to supplement the five it already has.

The last time so many people wanted to sell real estate in California was in 1990. In what might be an ominous sign for the current boom, that year marked a peak in the housing market.

There are 437,000 agents in California, enough to form the state's eighth-largest city. With only 680,000 home sales a year, competition for listings can be savage.

New agents call every person they know or might have met once. They "farm" neighborhoods, which means blanketing them with brochures. They knock on strangers' doors. They call people who are selling their homes without an agent and try to sign them up. They swoop in just as another agent is about to sign a client and steal him away.

Petralia works the phone for days at a time.

"Hi, I'm Joseph Petralia from Coldwell Banker. I'm doing a survey in the neighborhood.... "

That's his standard opening line. Petralia is working ZIP Code 95118, a middle-class neighborhood in San Jose with 7,752 single-family properties. His database, a commercial product that has been filtered through the National Do Not Call Registry, supplies numbers for 985 of them.

It's Monday morning, a good time to catch people after the distractions of the weekend. Within minutes, Petralia is chatting with a homeowner. Unfortunately, not a sympathetic one. "Hell, no, I'm not moving," this fellow says. "I was born and raised on this street 85 years ago."