Toni Marmo says she studied for her real estate license only to fix one quick issue: helping her boyfriend buy a house. But she quickly realized she loved the subject. Selling homes seemed like a better fit for her unfiltered, energetic demeanor than the three years she spent studying international business before dropping out, or the time she spent as a hair stylist, where she preferred selling products over styling. After leaving both behind, she moved to real estate last year. “A true entrepreneur doesn’t need to go to college for entrepreneurship,” Marmo says. “You’ve just got it. You just have it in your body.”
The typical American Realtor is a 55-year-old white woman who went to college and owns a home, according to the National Association of Realtors’ (NAR) 2024 member profile. That Marmo is not. She’s a 24 year-old with 40,000 TikTok followers who pokes fun at stereotypes of her generation, and leverages her following to get leads in her home state of New Jersey. She loves it, she tells me, because like fellow Gen Zers, she is so over the 9 to 5. “You’re working for someone else to make all the money, but you’re putting the most of the work in,” Marmo says of the corporate path. “If you could put that much work into yourself, why not do it?”
Some Zoomers like Marmo are ditching four-year degrees in favor of work that unchains them from a desk, puts money in their bank accounts sooner, and — they hope — will survive the artificial intelligence boom that is already starting to change once-hot professions like software engineering, consulting, and marketing. Some are turning to blue collar work like HVAC servicing and wind turbine installation. Others are trying to start their own ventures via influencing and side hustles. And some see the lure in the licensed white-collar job, including working in real estate or insurance.
That shift in licensed jobs is slow, but growing. The share of Realtors younger than 30 grew from 1% to 4% in 2024, according to NAR’s member profile, and sits at 3% in 2025. Among insurance agents, the median age of an insurance principal who owns 20% or more of their agency is 55, with 22% of principals over the age of 66, according to a 2024 study of agencies conducted by the Big “I,” an association for independent insurance agents. Many are likely eying retirement, which could open up a huge amount of demand for young people to take up the trade.
Several Gen Zers I spoke to for this story told me they find appeal in working in real estate because there’s no ceiling on what they can earn. Rather than invest tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in a four-year degree, they can spend a few weeks or months training to receive licenses and start working in fields where their hustle correlates to their payday.
That’s refreshing for a generation that’s watched the white-collar jobs they grew up aspiring to work dry up. Young workers have found themselves facing mass layoffs despite being high performers now that the era of workplace loyalty is dying.
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“Autonomy is such a big piece of it, and something we hear consistently from students that there’s the idea of: Be your own boss, make your own way. It’s you. You’ll sink or swim based on your effort,” says Blake Garrett, CEO of Aceable, an online platform that focuses on licensing in industries like real estate, mortgage, and insurance. “There is a direct correlation to your effort and your earning potential, and that doesn’t happen with many white collar jobs.”
I was making at that point $80,000, they had accrued $80,000 in debt.Whitney Harvey, a 30-year-old Realtor in Tennessee
Half of the people who take courses with Aceable are under 30, says Garrett. Those industries fit with Gen Z’s priorities: flexibility, autonomy, and high salaries — among all generations, they pin financial security to the highest average salary of about $200,000. Gen Z is more exposed to high spending habits thanks to influencers who show off their hauls, and many recall growing up in households affected by the 2008 financial crisis and its lingering economic uncertainty. They crave higher salaries to feel stable. (The average insurance agent makes about $60,000 a year, per the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the median Realtor makes nearly $58,000, per NAR. The median pay for a Gen Z college graduate is $60,000 and $40,000 for a high school graduate, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.)
Americans are losing trust in the ROI of a college degree. A 2025 Gallup poll found that only 42% of respondents had a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education, compared to 57% of people in 2015. As once-reliable roles in Big Tech have started to dwindle, young people who studied computer engineering and computer science had higher unemployment rates than those who studied art history, journalism, and performing arts, according to a 2023 data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Student enrollment at colleges dropped by 8.5% by 2024 from its peak in 2010, according to the Education Data Initiative. The federal government is freezing funding for research, or even stripping it from some universities as it attacks colleges in an all-out culture war. To top it all off, the average Gen Zer who invested in a four-year degree is working to pay off around $23,000 in student debt, according to Experian.
Whitney Harvey, a 30-year-old Realtor in Tennessee, tells me she dreamed about being a nuclear engineer, but got to college and realized that she and chemical equations just didn’t vibe. She dropped out after about a year, and at 18 got her license to become a real estate agent. She took her first job with a brokerage firm where they called her “the baby,” she says. Harvey estimates there wasn’t another person under 50 working there, and tells me she first learned about property taxes when studying for her license. But she soon started posting listings to Facebook, something none of her coworkers were doing, and made her first sale. Not long after, the older agents were coming to her for advice on how to use social media for their listings. “I really was able to capture like a whole new set of first-time homebuyers,” Harvey says.
Those early career years did set her apart from her friends, who were still in college. “It was mind boggling,” she tells me. “I was making at that point $80,000, they had accrued $80,000 in debt.”
Because it’s still something of a rarity to see a baby-faced real estate agent or teenager selling life insurance, the young people in licensure jobs I spoke to say that succeeding means not just learning the trade but competing against ageist stereotypes. The median age of a first-time home buyer has risen to an all-time-high of 38, according to NAR. That’s up from an average age of 33 a decade ago, according to a Zillow analysis. The idea of having a newly minted, 18-year-old real estate agent guide you through the biggest financial decision of your life is jarring. Katie Kenny, a 24-year-old Realtor in Chicago’s suburbs, says people meet her and are surprised, as they “expect the real estate agent to be like double my age,” she tells me. “They’re like, ‘oh, you’re young.’ And then when I open my mouth and start talking, they’re actually surprised because I do know a lot more, and I sound a lot more mature than what a normal 24-year-old would sound like.”
Social media is also giving these industries more cache among young people. Insurance brokers post videos to TikTok detailing how much money they made each day of the week. The agents, typically young women, film themselves typing on their computers as their earnings flash on the screen: Wednesday: $0, but on Thursday: $3,000. Some brag about making thousands of dollars a month from home at just 19, and others use sound memes and TikTok trends to mock the differences between themselves and older agents in their offices.
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The same goes for real estate agents, who film themselves donning matching sets and making their way to pristine, open house ready homes. Marmo posts videos of herself walking through kitchens that she calls “so aesthetic” or noting that a prospective buyer could film their “get ready with me” videos in the large, well-lit bathroom. Some older real estate agents comment on her videos from time to time and criticize her candid nature as unprofessional, but Marmo says her clients don’t mind. She says she will tell them that a kitchen “eats,” and that they might be confused, but typically aren’t put off. Marmo says it’s part of what makes her seem authentic, and as long as she can back up what she says with knowledge, her clients trust her. “Making time for clients and going an extra mile, it really does give you a lot of credibility,” Marmo says.
A thirst for AI by corporations is upending slices of the white collar job market, and Gen Z is nervous. More than 60% of the college class of 2025 who were familiar with AI tools said they were at least somewhat concerned that AI would affect their career prospects, increasing from 44% in 2023, according to a survey from early career site Handshake.
For now, Gen AI tools are less of a threat to replace workers in fields like real estate and insurance than in tech. Insurance brokerage is a “very people focused,” field, says Jamie Behymer, the director of diversity, inclusion, and young agents at the Big “I.” “Relationships are what drive the industry,” she says. While agents might be using AI to help with paperwork or tedious tasks, “the industry is really focusing on relationships over AI.”
Kenny says she uses AI to help stage houses and give on-the-fence clients a feel for how they could use spaces or map routes for her showings. She sometimes drafts tricky emails or social media posts with ChatGPT — but it’s not about to replace her. Broker bots aren’t going to stage and host an open house with fresh-baked cookies or be your preferred first phone call when disaster strikes. “It can’t open the door, it can’t negotiate with a seller’s agent,” Kenny tells me. “I like the hustle. I like that you’re not capped with how hard you can work.”
Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.
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