HR Challenges Real Estate Market Faces in Egypt

HR Challenges Real Estate Market Face in Egypt

Real Estate Market in Egypt is a very competitive market, new developers are appearing everyday which require hiring well trained and talented people to cope with the red ocean market.

HR Managers face many challenges due to the increasing of hiring demand and decreasing the number of the qualified talents. Here we are talking about the main challenges, its causes and try to find solutions.

Challenge 1: Hiring and Retaining Talents

Due to the increasing of the number of real estate companies in Egypt, recruiters are forced to hire young specialists to fill the empty boxes in the structure and create teams to start selling as fast as possible.

Young specialists almost have little or no experience and companies provide them with brief and surface training, plus offering them minimum salaries.

Due to the mentioned actions in property management and sales employees, companies tend to fall quickly or just looking for quick wins actions without drawing or building a real strategy for developing their position in the market.

Offering non-efficient training and letting the new employees figuring out things on their own without a real mentorship program resulting low performance and lack of motivation, forcing young talents to look for better job positions and cause a high turnover rate for companies. On the other hand to retain talents companies tends to play with positions and promoted titles for employees trying to motivate and retain them.

Challenge 2: Lack of Corporate Training Programs

Covid-19 pandemic forced all companies to relocate their budgets and their priorities, and unfortunately most of the companies started with cutting the cost of training and development programs, plus giving promotions and titles for employees to gain their satisfactions ignoring their years experience, that produced a generation of untrained and demotivated leaders and managers with inability to motivate and develop their teams, forced teams to look for better places and better managers to work with.

And to be honest Covid-19 pandemic is not the only reason for having unqualified leaders and managers in the real estate market in Egypt. There are many other reasons for that result:

Most of HR managers consider training and development to be an essential business development tool, but they are controlled by owners’ directions and visions, which almost are looking for marketing activities not for developing and investing in employees in a long-term plan.

High talents in the real estate market in Egypt, claim that their potential doesn’t got fulfilled completely due to the lack of training and knowledge they need to gain.

In a recent survey about if the corporate training and development affect employees’ decisions to stay with the company, 70% say that continues training and access updating in the market through continuous training and development process will make them more loyal to the companies they are working for.

Challenge 3: Health and Safety Issues

?Here I am not talking about safety in the construction sites, but I am talking about how employees feel safe physically and mentally.

Due to he high turn over rate in the real estate market in Egypt, medical insurance is not a point to be considered in the attracting and retaining process specially for sales employees. Companies are ignoring that real estate sales employees need good insurance just as any other employees in the company. However, providing sales agents and employees with medical insurance is a requirement that any company should comply with.?

Real estate sales are often exposed to high levels of stress and frequently experience burnout and need assistance from a mental health professionals.

Thinking About Solutions: How can we tackle these issues?

Choosing the right approach to the employees and ensuring the right execution of HR-oriented strategies is a must for real estate business. All the issues mentioned above, influence how real estate business operates in a negative way, but luckily, they can be fixed.

incorporating changes in the corporate policy will help us solve some of the problems, mentioned above:

Solution 1: ?Setting a clear and right corporate communication policy

Fixing the work environment by setting the right cycle of communications and relationships for every title and among all departments in the company.

?Regarding the work environment, corporate policy should contain a system of clauses that will support healthy relationships among your employees. For instance, regular staff meetings, office gatherings, and parties, mentorship programs for both new and existing employees will fix the atmosphere in a workplace and will reduce stress caused by high competition. Real estate business is a highly competitive field, however, it is possible to alleviate the stress by encouraging healthy relationships among employees.

Solution 2: Providing a Continues Training and Development programs for Employees

It’s true that real estate sales and agents are always on the go. Their schedule can be too hectic to find extra time for education. However, setting training plan for employees in each level in the company, set standers, consider and use employees’ feedback to feedforward and enhance the learning process in the company. Setting and mentoring the new comers and employees on board learning and training cycle.

Set product knowledge tests and competitions with prices and useful evaluation and feedback system, push the employee to evaluate him/herself based on a well-studied processes and steps, will make employee watching his/her progress and participating in the personal development plan positively.

With the emergence of online education, there appeared many platforms, where famous universities, as well as private individuals, offer different courses.

Solution 3:??Health and safety issues.

One of the most important tasks is to offer some affordable insurance options to help employees feel safe. Uninsured employees are at risk of being fined, and, as their employer, you’ll face issues as well.

Final Thoughts

Real estate industry is very specific. Managing real estate agents can be difficult, taking into consideration the peculiarities of their job. Nevertheless, with the right approach to corporate policy, technology implementation, and corporate development, we’ll be able to fix HR-related problems and help our employees fulfill their potential and satisfy their needs.

Our employees are our main resource of income and the foundation of our company’s reputation. Although real estate business is highly competitive, high staff turnover cannot be justified solely by this reason. Our task is to support the key needs of our employees, including safe workplace, protected health and the opportunity to speak up and openly discuss issues.

Real Estate HR Consulting

Sahar Samy