Feast, then famine. Hundreds of thousands of realtors to lose their jobs - Will anyone miss 'em?

CNN is reporting on the realtor shake-out underway. Poor fellas, no matter how much they lied, no matter how much they spinned, and no matter how much they tried to discredit HP, the bubble blogs and the MSM for reporting the truth, the truth, as it always does, comes out.

And that truth is that the housing bubble was a blip, an investor-fueled, credit-fueled, greed-fueled blip.

And so was the blip in realtors. Goodbye. You're no longer needed. Go find some honest work for a change.

The legions of people who jumped into work as real estate brokers during the recent boom are seeing leaner times.

There wasn't just a boom in real estate over the past decade - there was also a big boom in real estate agents.

Floods of people across the country applied for real estate licenses, attracted by record sales volumes and seemingly non-stop price gains.

During the boom's peak from 2002 to 2004, the National Association of Realtors (NAR) saw memberships soar 26 percent. Today, over 1.2 million Americans call themselves Realtors.

But the exuberance couldn't last forever: the NAR forecasts existing home sales to fall 7.6 percent in 2006. Agents, who work on commission, are already beginning to feel the bite.

"We've seen a big softening in Florida - there are fewer sales to be spread around more sales people," Richard Fryer, President of IFREC Real Estate Schools, a Florida school that offers a variety of real estate courses including a class to get your license. "Obviously there are some people who are not generating a lot of income in this market."

Some realtors are beginning to look to other professions for an income to sustain them during the tightening. "Many agents in my local community are really crying the blues," said Geri DeWitt Ruby, a REMAX agent in upstate New York. "They're very pessimistic, and they're even talking about finding other employment."