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Estate agents new work ethic
At a party
hosted by a large estate agency recently, there was a small but telling
exchange. The director had recently instructed his staff that days away
from the office shooting, watching polo or generally carousing, were now
to be taken as leave rather than seen as a perk of the job.
"It's so not
fair," grumbled his minion. "It's a way of making contacts."
"No, it's a
way of taking a day off," said his boss sternly. "You want to shoot, you
do it in your own time."
There was
pouting and muttering before a compromise was reached: bring back two
leads from a shoot and it would be declared a work day, otherwise it was
coming out of an agent's annual leave allowance.
It may not
be the hard-nosed office culture that those who work in many other
industries recognise but, in terms of estate agency, the message was
clear: we need results and we need to be seen to be working to get them.
And of course, the threat of redundancies is now ever-present: research
for The Daily Telegraph by the National Association of Estate
Agents calculates that the number of estate agents in work has fallen from
80,000 in the summer of 2007 to 48,000 by the end of last year.
"The trouble
with estate agency is that it was for a long time a harbour for Johnny
Redbrace who wasn't quite bright enough for the City and failed to get
into the Army and thought it would be a jolly nice thing to have a crack
at," says Andrew Scott, a partner at Strutt & Parker. "It was an industry
that was populated by people who didn't work very hard – up until the
middle of 2007 you could drive a nice Mercedes and take holidays in
Barbados just by turning up. You didn't really have to do anything."
Scott is
unusual (but may not be alone) in displaying a certain relish for the
current downturn. His theory is that it drives out Johnny Redbrace – and
his more cunning colleague, Larry Lizard – and helps to turn the business
into a profession. He did, after all, haul the newly established S&P
London office through the last recession and says, with some glee, that
eight competitors within 100 yards of his office went under in that
period.
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