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Not sure what there is to rag about in this essay. Refugee from publishing industry figures out where the money is, gets licensed, starts raking it in. You could argue that she's something of a "sellout," but to me that word has no meaning anymore.
I guess really the only question she might have asked herself, all along, is whether she bothered to find out whether her buying clients could afford the mortgages they'd been granted. But I'm guessing she was probably operating under the assumption that if someone has a $500,000 loan to buy a house, they probably have the means to pay it off regularly. I was kind of staggered myself to find out that mortgage companies weren't asking for proof of income or employment or good credit or any of that. Our mortgage application was actually pretty thorough.
I'm guessing that of all the cogs in the machinery of this disaster, the real estate agent was probably one of the less culpable. The mortgage companies came first. Then the sellers, many of whom were trying to get as much as they could for their little shitboxes (and in some cases buying and flipping as fast as they could). Then the buyers, unwilling to live within their means and somehow utterly deafened to common sense--why settle for a $150,000 house when the bank was waving a $500,000 loan before their eyes?
You could always move to appraisals, you know. My mother-in-law is supposed to be semi-retired, but she still has more work than she knows what to do with. Hang in there and don't beat yourself up. Good times don't last, but neither do bad ones.
