Sam Frederick Releases & Mixes

(Editor's note: I had to find an excuse to use one of these awesome Vince Vaughn stock photos)

Any real estate salesperson who tells you they've never questioned whether or not the commission percentage they pay their broker is justified is either lying, or way too trusting.

It's okay, everyone does it.

A savvy professional owes it to themselves to regularly reassess whether or not they are being compensated fairly given the value they add to a business -- this is only natural.  Unfortunately, the real estate industry is one of those places where these sorts of questions are often answered with: "Well, we have always done it this way", and as a result, there is a certain amount of transparency lacking in the reasoning behind these decisions.

We all enjoy a good murder mystery on the commute to work, but sometimes it is nice to find podcasts with the kind of substance that help develop your own professional skill set.  So, unless you have your Maryland real estate license, and are planning on buying up property next to the Windsor Mill Best Buy so you can flip it at a profit to obsessed Serial fans, then you may need to go beyond Sarah Koenig's hit to find podcasts that will help push your career forward.

The team here curated a list -- in no particular order -- of the best real estate podcasts with material focused on improving your sales performance as an agent and/or broker (Note: For the sake of this particular list, we will not include shows centered around real estate investment and house flipping -- although, we do hope to cover those in a later post).

"A home is only worth what someone will pay for it"

When determining the value of a house -- or any property for that matter -- knowing the price that a recently closed, almost indentical property sold for is crucial.

While some may find it surprising to learn that the borough now has neighborhoods with average rents well above a number of areas in notoriously expensive Manhattan.

According to a report done by MNS, the average rent in Manhattan last month was $3,836 -- this is comfortably below Brooklyn's Dumbo neighborhood, which ended December 2014 at $4,237.