If you’ve called your property manager and found they’re no longer working for the agency, you’re not alone.
Staff turnover is a huge issue in real estate and can be annoying for landlords and tenants. That’s why Rentwest Solutions works hard to retain its employees.
Staff retention is a problem in the real estate industry
Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) data reveals the average annual employee turnover rate in the rental and real estate industry was 11.7% in the year until February 2019. This means that each year more than one in 10 staff who work in real estate will leave their employer.
To put this in perspective, the proportion of the entire Australian workforce that changed jobs across all industries during this same period was 8.5%. So staff turnover is high in our industry. In fact, the only industry that beats us is hospitality, which topped the list with 17.9% turnover.
The number of people leaving the jobs in real estate is higher than construction, mining, the arts, professional services and retail.
Why is high staff turnover a problem in the real estate industry?
Whether you’re selling a house or managing an investment property, real estate is an industry built on relationships. And when you have high staff turnover, it can create relationship problems.
Having a constantly changing parade of different faces, or different voices on the phone every time you call your agency, can create issues with continuity. Knowledge can be quickly lost when a person moves on, so crucial details get missed or misinterpreted and important backstories or histories are ignored.
This is particularly important in property management, where the landlord, tenant and property manager need to work together. So it really makes a difference when a property manager has an intimate knowledge of their portfolio.
How Rentwest Solutions does things differently
In our experience, high staff turnover often happens when there’s a lack of training, supervision and support. It can also be due to industry hiring practices where large franchise groups ask wannabe real estate agents to work in property management as a stepping stone to sales. That can only lead to disaster.
Property management is a skill that’s very different from selling. As a specialist property management company, we pride ourselves on being experts in what we do.
We only employ staff who actually want a career in property management. Many of our staff were experienced property managers before they joined us. In fact, three of our senior staff each have spent over 30 years in property management, meaning our team has an enormous depth of experience to draw upon.
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Crucially, we also have a very good track record of retaining staff and a lot of our property managers have been with us for many years. We understand that staff turnover is normally a bugbear for investors and work hard to avoid it.
Of our team of 25 staff, our longest-serving employees have been with us for 15 and 12 years. That could be something of a record in our industry.
As dedicated property management specialists, we also invest heavily in training and development, and are actively involved in REIWA and improving professionalism across our industry.
If you have any questions contact our team of experienced property managers today.
