Illustrations by Henri Campeã
A report from recruitment consultancy Macdonald & Co suggests it has been a year of mixed fortunes for those working in the real estate sector.
The good news is that you have probably had a salary increase in the past year – 62% of the 15,000 global respondents had received a pay rise. Of those, 20% said it had increased in response to a rise in the cost of living or as an inflationary adjustment.
The bad news is that if you work in the UK, salary inflation was only 0.1% year-on-year compared to a global average of 2.1%. Peter Moore MRICS, managing director at Macdonald & Co, says: “The UK has seen steeper salary inflation in the last four years than many of its international counterparts. The 0.1% figure represents a normalising of salaries after a successive period of double-digit salary inflation.”
Perhaps the most concerning fact to come out of the report is that the gender pay gap persists globally and with large regional variations. In the US, it stands at 20.6% but in the Middle East it is 78%. Of course, some of this comes down to there being more men in senior positions with higher salaries but that caveat tells its own story of gender imbalance in the industry.
Of the seven regions that Macdonald & Co’s report focuses on, the Middle East is where you’ll find the highest average real estate salary of $160,000. Real estate professionals working in Germany, the US, Singapore and Hong Kong all command significantly higher pay than the UK ($73,843) with the average in the US at $145,000, almost double the UK’s.
The gender pay gap is still very much in evidence globally – the average salary for men working in real estate is $109,492 (£85,596) compared to $70,662 (£55,239) for women. That’s a 35.5% disparity. Structural inequalities that create such pay gaps should be addressed, especially in a sector that explicitly wants to recruit more women.
When questioned about the factors that give them the most benefit in their current role, a higher proportion of women than men cited flexible hours and work location. Women were also more likely to report feeling undervalued in their workplace.
“The gender pay gap remains a very stubborn recurring theme,” says Moore. “However, progress is being made at the two extremes of the market. Salaries are increasing faster for females at the entry level and board level, closing the pay gaps.
“Yet there remains lots of lessons employers can learn from how they manage salary review gateways for junior to senior management to avoid unconscious bias in applying unfair pay policies.”
“The gender pay gap remains a very stubborn recurring theme” Peter Moore MRICS, Macdonald & Co
It is perhaps unsurprising that employer types which cover the financial sector pay the most: generally, real estate professionals in this sector are well renumerated. But emergent areas of technology are also expanding and actively recruiting.
“Typically, investment and funds employers pay the most but we’re seeing a rise in the tech sector too,” says Chanelle Alhinai, head of marketing at Macdonald & Co. “We’ve been trying to find people who work in tech but with a real estate slant and that’s quite niche, so salaries are high.”
While it is hard to quantify what individual companies are looking for, Alhinai says that evidence of good commercial instincts and financial acumen make candidates stand out in these highly rewarded roles. Increasingly, an understanding of sustainability and its implementation is becoming desirable.
62% of real estate professionals received a pay rise in the past year
Very few people wish to come into the office five days a week and, accordingly, very few respondents (just 1.7%) do. A third of employees work entirely remotely, 28% are in the office one or two days a week and 36% three or four days a week. These figures are very similar to last year, which suggests that the option to work from home has become embedded.
Nevertheless, a not-insignificant minority of 17% of respondents – rising to 21% in Asia – feel that these arrangements have negatively impacted their career development.
The majority of respondents in all sectors reported a skills shortage, with local government (84.6%) and utilities (84.8%) the sectors with the biggest talent deficit. On a regional level, only Africa had a majority of respondents that believed a skills shortage was unlikely.
As for recruiting, only 28.7% of local government employees believed their employers would be increasing headcount and in education 35.9% foresaw additional recruitment to fill the gap. At the other end of the scale, 69% of respondents in the technology sector thought their employers would be increasing headcount this year.
Only four in 10 respondents felt happy with their rewards package, although this increased with seniority. For example, around 60% of British C-suite professionals and Americans working at either managerial level or as consultants were content with their rewards package.
The most popular benefit an employer can offer is enhanced pension contributions. But other potential rewards are more regional in popularity: in the UK, for example, a private health check is enthusiastically received, as is subsidised travel, possibly because of high British commuting costs.
In Asia and the Middle East, a much higher proportion opted for employers contributing to holiday flights – which could be explained by the number of expats working in these areas.
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