Growing up, senior Maddie Reynolds would help her dad in real estate. She would take pictures of the houses being listed, and from there, she slowly found herself being interested in the world of real estate.
“I always wanted to invest in properties and renovate them, so I was like okay might as well go get my own license. That’s what I’m working towards now, hopefully,” Reynolds said.
Reynolds took her real estate course through Wando online and she took two extra courses for two different licenses.
“One for the nation to get my national license and one to get my state license. Once you have passed those classes and then you have to take a test in a proctored setting. After I graduate high school, they can officially give it to me and you have to be 18,” Reynolds said.
She hopes to continue her real estate career through college to help her pay for her education. When she first told her parents about her wanting to do real estate, they were astonished by her decision.
“They were impressed. They were really all about it. My dad has helped me with everything I have questions on and he’s taught me so much and like just watching him do it, they were all about it,” Reynolds said.
Such a path doesn’t come without challenges. For Reynolds, it was waiting to be an official real estate agent and having to take another real estate test for the state of Florida.
“The main one is just having to wait to actually get my official license because you do need your diploma, after that I get my South Carolina one. Since I’m going to college in Florida, I’m gonna have to take another class on top of the one I just accomplished,” Reynolds said.
Although Reynolds took her real estate class online, there is a real estate class that started about six years ago at the East Cooper Center for Advanced Studies. Anyone can take this class taught by the entrepreneurship/ real estate teacher David Fralix.
“I was teaching a marketing class and I was going through how to calculate commissions on sales. The best example of a straight commission job that I could think of was real estate agent. He says, ‘what’s required to have a license? You have a high school diploma or equivalent. You have 90 hours worth of pre-licensing instruction, and you take the licensing exam. So I said to him, ‘You know, somebody could come up with a class and offer it to seniors in their last semester, because we’ve got a 135 hours in a typical class to get the 90 hours requirement met and you could graduate and get your license afterwards’,” Fralix said.
Since there is only one program for real estate, the class ranges from being around 25-35 juniors and seniors. Senior Kaliyah Middleton joined his class her sophomore year.
“I was signing up for classes and I just ended up in the class my sophomore second semester. I wasn’t supposed to be in the class originally because it’s only for juniors and seniors,” Middleton said.
With being on the opposite side of the classroom listening to Fralix teach, she started finding the class very interesting. Certain lessons would start to stick out to her.
“My sophomore year when I was in the class, the roles in real estate. It’s so diverse to where you can do anything on top of what you’re doing now. You don’t have to just be in real estate, you don’t have to just be a buyer’s agent or a seller’s agent. You can be a contractor or electrician in real estate,” Middleton said.
Middleton wants to make an impact on the real estate industry. As she wants to do real estate on the side in the future.
“I see me making a difference in the real estate industry with people buying houses and people knowing what the process is in buying houses in real estate. I want to educate my buyers on what it takes to buy a house and not just leave them in the dark and just sign papers or not,” Middleton said.
In the future Reynolds hopes to continue with real estate, for she wants to help people sell and buy their houses.
“In the future, I’d really just love to invest in my own personal property, be able to renovate homes and decorate them,” Reynolds said. “Which is like the more fun part of it, but if you have more knowledge on them.”