Cobalt news

Building International Property Teams

Timothy Rowe

02/04/2008

As the pan-European property market continues to mature in terms of the evolution of international, rather than regional operators, so does the requirement for multi-lingual regionally based teams.

Building teams in diverse locations and markets, whilst retaining a cohesive corporate approach is difficult to achieve and requires clear management structures and a consistency in the quality of professionals.

Creating an engaging and rewarding company in which to work is an essential part of growing a successful organisation both for attracting and retaining staff and for successful and entrepreneurial output.  Leadership is of crucial importance to employee engagement. Faith, confidence and inspiration from the leaders and their values are all higher in those companies where employees are more engaged.  Good leadership doesn't just mean setting the strategic direction for the business but also clearly communicating to new and existing employees that their valuable contribution to the business will be recognised and rewarded.

The formula for an engaged workforce in a company is; treating people with respect, leading by example, fairly rewarding hard work and giving each team member room to grow.  This freedom gives individuals a chance to flourish in a collegiate team environment.  The real estate industry relies on specialist expertise coming together through the coordination of disparate skills in order to get schemes and initiatives off the ground.  There needs to be a consistency of approach across a network of offices.

Those companies that can sell their businesses to new prospective staff based on strong principals of driving their staff to be well rewarded, trained and promoted on merit undoubtedly have a much better chance of attracting staff when it comes to recruitment.  Across geographies in the recruitment of real estate professionals, Cobalt Recruitment is finding that there is still a significant trend of good quality candidates getting a number of offers to consider in addition to counter offers and 'buy-backs' from their existing employees.

In terms of attracting talent to an organisation we find that a coherent recruitment process is essential.  Those organisations that have defined what their selling points are and communicate them during the interview process are much more likely to engage with new employees.  Remembering that the interview process is a two-way dialogue may seem obvious but worth reflecting on as that gives employers a huge competitive advantage.

There is a pool of talent in many markets and whilst key centres such as London, Frankfurt and Paris, do not have the monopoly on talent, they do have more volume, making them an obvious place to locate and source new staff.  We find that in the current market we are managing to relocate professionals from London and other mainstream markets to the emerging markets of CEE, Asia, Australia and the Middle East. Due to the investment drive and large scale infrastructure projects across the globe there is a trend towards relocating staff to where the action is.  This is also taking up the slack created by some markets calming in the current climate.

Current Trends:

• International professionals moving to CIS and CEE due to the fact that it is an exciting, dynamic because it is a naïve market
• People are still being attracted to the Asian markets due to its strong international interest.
• Scandinavian and Benelux countries open to recruitment from other locations.
• India seeing many requirements for international professionals.
• In Germany we are still seeing significant demand which is made all the more difficult to meet as there is a reluctance to move between centres in Germany

Timothy Rowe is a Director of Cobalt Recruitment, a pan-European Real Estate recruiter, which achieved 3rd place in The Sunday Times 100 Best Small Companies to Work for 2008 and has opened a Berlin office this month.