The balance of power in the world economy is shifting East. What does that mean for a career in property? In this latest EG round table, we ask employers how much importance they place on international experience, and how they see employment prospects at home and abroad. Round table pictures by Marcus Rose
What are candidates looking for in today’s recruitment market?
Tim Rowe It depends on the individual, and it depends on the stage of career that they’re at. They are not looking, necessarily, for the biggest pay packet, and that is a significant change on four-plus years ago, where it was a bidding process for nought- to six-, seven-year post-qualified skills.
As you go through the ranks, the overriding requirement is security.
Aside from salary, what other rewards motivate in the current climate?
Sanjeev Sharma People work for us because they like the culture and they like the values of the organisation. People talk a lot about the employer brand, but it’s when you turn up in the morning, you’re happy to be there sat at your desk, because you feel valued and that you are contributing.
Clearly, remuneration is vital as well, but it’s not the only thing. People don’t tend to leave because they haven’t got a 2% or 3% pay rise. They tend to leave because they don’t get on with their manager or they’re not delivering or they’re not doing the work they want to do. And what we find is that people come to us because they want to work client-side, because they want to work on the principal side.
Annually, we do total reward statements. Forty per cent of the people in PRUPIM are in the final salary-defined benefits scheme, and for those sorts of people you could add in 30% or 40% in terms of equivalent-to-base salary. What we do is provide everyone with a sort of a pie chart in terms of the total value of their package. And sometimes you are talking about 40%, 50% or 60% if you add up everything else. It’s about making people aware of that. I have had conversations with people who say: “I’ve seen a similar job that’s paying £10,000 more.” You then have to ask about all the other bits and all the unsalaried bits. You need to look at the whole package overall.
What skills does the industry need?
Robert Peto What we need to do is to produce chartered surveyors who, unless they’re in specialist areas of building surveying, are good-quality people who understand the breadth of real estate. Then they can specialise. But the problem is that we’re trying to get our people to specialise far too early. They haven’t got a clue what they want, and you go to university and then the university course, and you say, well, okay, so you’ve got to be able to understand international financial accounting, you’ve got to do this and that. At 21, what do they know about it? It goes in one ear and it goes out the other, because they’re not able to use that information.
I do believe that there is a renaissance taking place in the desire of people to get proper training. One of the big drivers that we’re finding is that, for people who want go and work for a particular firm as a trainee, it isn’t just about job security, which is important. It’s about training. That’s completely the other way round from what it was 10 years ago. It’s now: “I need a career. I need long-term security. I need to get trained and I’m not going to go to a firm that’s not going to honour that obligation.” That is a fundamentally different approach from how it was 10 to 12 years ago.
Nick Shattock I sit on Asset Skills, one of the government’s sector skills councils, for property and facilities management. The point of sector skills is really to increase employment in those sectors and employability. We have conversations with the RICS; asking as an employer, what is it we’re looking for from people? Hopefully, we can influence the curriculum, the qualifications and the type of individuals coming through. So when we do recruit, these people are employable from day one, and what we don’t have do is to re-educate them all over again, which is probably something we were having to do five or six years ago.
There were people who knew everything about valuations, but didn’t know their role at work, so couldn’t use a PC properly or didn’t have any interpersonal skills. Things are changing, so it is moving in the right direction.
How important is offering an international dimension to a property career to UK property professionals?
Nick Axford There’s no denying that having a global scope to the business has a number of different attractions to it. It’s not to do with the quality of the individuals necessarily, or the quality of the work that gets done, but a lot of the big instructions in many areas of our business now do get awarded or have a global dimension to them, so that the larger global groups who are represented round the table, and us, do tend to pick up quite a lot of that business.
We always get asked, what are the opportunities to travel, what are the opportunities to work overseas? We very much resist the attitude: “I’d like to spend this winter in Barcelona working for three months,” because, you know, people can view it as a way of just getting a company to finance them going off on a holiday.
More importantly, there are lots of opportunities within our business. We’ve had lots of moves around the world recently, and I know quite a lot of people have arrived in our competitors’ offices who I knew in London. Whether it’s moves around Europe, whether it’s an opportunity to work in increasingly international teams – which means you get exposure to international business or the opportunity to work overseas for an extended period – that definitely is an attraction.
In Asia, we are looking for people who’ve got cross-border experience within Asia. Talking to a lot of the capital that’s out here, very often what they want is a local contact in other parts of the world who can, literally and metaphorically, speak their language. A lot of us are spending an awful lot of time targeting the Korean pension funds at the moment, and yet almost all of those funds have made it absolutely clear that they want to be dealing with Korean nationals.
Within Europe, we have all now become perfectly accustomed to the fact that French, German, Dutch and Spanish nationals will be working in each other’s businesses, as well as in London. We tend to have international teams within Europe. And that’s going to continue. In retail, we see a lot of the big stores in London making sure they’ve got Mandarin-speaking staff to cater for tourists. And we will be putting emphasis on trying to make sure that we’ve got a range of Mandarin-speaking staff working in our London business.That’s a process that other people are going to be going through as well.
What’s the outlook for recruitment in the property industry?
Tony Horrell There’s an awful lot of noise out there in the industry. There are definitely too many people working in real estate for the volume of activity that’s out there. Over the next 12 to 18 months, there will be quite a big shake out. You’ll definitely see that across the regional cities of the UK, and I think you’ll see it a little bit in London as well.
Timothy Rowe Are there too many people in the property market? The short answer of course is, yes. But there aren’t enough good people in the property market, in the profession, generally, which is why it’s always difficult to find good people.
