Blog / Time Management
Understanding the people space
with Michael Edwards Property All Stars
People are what make real estate tick and finding the right person for your business can be the difference between profit and loss.
You may need people, but how do you go about finding them? What do you do? It’s not just about putting an ad on SEEK and doing the interview process. You need someone who understands the intricacies of real estate, who can demonstrate initiative, who knows how to get on with people. You need someone who not only understands you but also understands your business and your people to find that right fit.
Michael Edwards from Property All Stars ran his own real estate business for over 16 years and now helms a recruitment service specifically for the real estate industry. He’s passionate about the real estate industry and now lists people instead of property. He really wants to make a difference for the people he works for.
He says, once he sold his real estate business, “I had a lot to give back; understanding the space, and understanding the people, and what people need in their business is very important. I sold my business a couple of years ago, and I wanted to go within the industry. Recruitment just seemed to be a good fit for me. After 16 years of working Saturdays and having a young family, getting that space back was important but I wanted to be in offices and working with agents.”
Michael’s company are real estate recruitment specialists operating in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne. They differ from the “traditional” recruitment companies by offering exceptional customer service while partnering and taking the time to understand a client’s values, vision and business. He believes that businesses should be constantly recruiting and planning because if you are not, someone else is, and employees are always looking.
Michael seeks to find the right people, for the right roles at the right time. He says, “I'm a firm believer that businesses should constantly be recruiting. The marketplace is out there. There's always another agency who's going to target your staff. You need to know who's coming through. You need to know what's happening, but the key thing for me is understanding businesses and their culture, their visions. If they've got a clear vision of where they want to go, we can work with them and find good staff to work with them. The key decision makers in the offices - they need to lead.”
Determined to make businesses transparent and effective and to make leadership easier, when he works with key decision makers in a business, Michael does the Structure Me exercise. He says, “When I first walk in there, I will get however many there might be, one, two, or three key decision makers, in a room and I'll give them a blank bit of paper,hree minutes, and they have to write down the structure of the business. The key thing is to not let them look at what other people are doing. Then they hand it over to me, and it's amazing that very few businesses come back with a clear organisational chart of the business or the structure.”
Further, Michael takes the time to get to know clients and their offices. He says, “It is so important for me to get face to face in the offices and see what they're doing, rather than just taking an enquiry over the phone and say, ‘Hey, we've got another job. This is what it is. These are our terms and conditions’. I actually don't send out any terms and conditions or anything, or give them to them until I actually meet them and decide if I want to work with them. I'm interviewing them while they're interviewing me.”
He also, “…encourages the businesses that I work with to recruit internally, and if they find someone, I'm happy to help them or our other consultants out with the interviewing process, because it's more important that they're getting the right staff in than us getting paid. Over time, we know it'll come back to us. We also run a referral program for our other candidates that we've placed, and for anyone who refers us a candidate, and once they're there for three months, we give them a $500 gift voucher.”
Property All Stars offers a range of services, from recruitment, to replacement, skill evolution, referrals, leadership and restructure to environment. He believes it is vital to do what you can to retain good staff – particularly managers. Everyone is on the lookout for good managers. He says, “As roles become tighter, trying to find good staff is actually really hard, especially from a management perspective. When I say management, I mean sales management, property management and administration. When you get good staff, you've got to keep them. Make them part of the culture, make them part of the vision of the business and hold onto them because they're expensive to replace - not just in timing, but money. People get comfortable with good staff in their business, and they're comfortable to go back and talk to them. When they ring up one day and they're not there anymore, they're like, ‘Oh, what happened there?’. Holding onto the culture and getting them to engage to it, is the most important part.”
And Michael and his team can show you how.
For more information please call Michael on 1300 014 908 or visit propertyallstars.com.au.
← Go back
