Attracting talent is no longer the only challenge facing real estate companies. It’s a start-up world out there, and ambitious rising stars are finding the urge to strike out on their own increasingly appealing. EG catches up with some of CRE’s most entrepreneurial alumni
“I never intended to have my own business,” says Olga Turner Baker. Back in 2016, the then 26-year-old senior surveyor at CBRE was an EG Rising Star, enjoying her work but grappling with how to tap into growing interest in wellbeing in building design.
There was no intention of leaving a secure, stable job at a global firm. But then Turner Baker (pictured above) met her Rising Stars cohort, including Savannah de Savary, founder of Built-ID, who told her that if you have a good idea, you will always be able to get it done faster if you do it yourself. “That was the last push,” Turner Baker says. She soon handed in her notice, and in January 2018 she launched Ekkist, an architectural design consultancy.
Turner Baker’s decision isn’t unique. As younger generations enter the property industry, it needs to be recognised that people are taking greater risks and being more footloose. According to Deloitte, nearly half (49%) of millennials last year said they would quit their current job within two years if they could. More than a third cited a lack of opportunities to advance, while 28% blamed a lack of development opportunities.
As in other industries, property companies need to understand what drives their talent to take a major career risk – and a pay cut along the way – to set up their own business, and how they can offer what future entrepreneurs want out of their jobs.
Keeping staff
Retention is particularly important for consultancy businesses, which will either succeed or fail based on their talent. “We’re not making anything physical. We’re not building anything. The value for us is in our people, and we take that to heart,” says Paul Hawtin, head of human resources for EMEA and APAC at CBRE.
The firm has a raft of employee schemes focused on retention, ranging from a “swap and share” scheme, where employees from one part of the world can change places with those from another, to reverse mentoring, where junior employees mentor senior staff (including divisional president Ciaran Bird), helping to bridge generational gaps. Hawtin says retention among people who have taken part in the swap and share scheme, for example, is higher – at 85-90% – than in the business as a whole.
He adds: “Organisations like ours have got better when it comes to managing people. Employee engagement and talent management were not previously key strategic pillars for HR departments. The level of sophistication has increased. That, therefore, has allowed us to hold on to people and nurture them more.”
Brand building
But no matter how good these initiatives are, there is a limit to what global firms can offer if someone wants to build their own brand. That was the case for Luke Appleby, co-founder of Kontor, who – alongside James Townsend – left CBRE to set up a business focused on finding workspace for start-ups.
When they initially pitched the idea of focusing on Old Street and Shoreditch to the firm, Appleby says that CBRE was supportive, but that it was “completely understandably” less supportive of the idea of creating a new brand that looked and felt like their intended clients in the design and tech industries.
“They were still suited and booted, and that’s fine. That was the audience we were talking to at the time in the City. But it created an invisible barrier to the clients we were trying to pitch to,” Appleby says.
He adds that putting together that business plan was effectively a full-time job that he could not do on top of his everyday obligations: “I’ve got to put food on the table and do my traditional job and make deals, and at the same time we’re trying to pioneer something new where we see the opportunity.”
For Turner Baker, leaving a large corporate structure meant she was able to have an early-mover advantage, becoming one of the first people to qualify as a WELL Accredited Professional, an expert in WELL building standards. “Because I was the only person who was a WELL AP and had residential expertise, it meant we very quickly got in with all the resi clients,” she says. As a result, Ekkist was able to work on early WELL-certified residential projects – before larger firms were able to catch up.
Pitch perfect
All this doesn’t, however, mean that large corporates are unable to give entrepreneurial employees independence and support. Savills, for example, runs a regular Dragons’ Den-style competition where employees can pitch ideas that the company will then consider funding.
Noel McGonigle, head of HR at Savills, says a structure like this was needed if the firm wanted to stay entrepreneurial as a company with thousands of employees. “This is a more formal way of capturing what used to happen more organically when the business was smaller, back when everyone was in one office and everyone knew each other,” he says.
For Cal Lee, who joined Savills as a graduate, that was the ideal place to launch his Workthere platform, which helps businesses find flexible workspace, in 2016. He says he weighed up the pros and cons of setting up on his own, but that staying with Savills was an easy decision given that having the backing of a major agent would set his business apart from similar start-ups.
Lee adds: “At 24, I didn’t know the first thing about setting up a business at that point. I could have gone out and sought advice, but Savills was good at surrounding me with people who did know what was needed to build a business, to market it and to build the technology.”
Stay on good terms
Regardless of whether a project takes off internally or after a leap into the unknown, every founder interviewed praises their old employees, adding that they made an effort to leave on good terms.
Étienne Cadestin, founder of Longevity Partners, says: “I always say that I’m a Knight Frank product.” Cadestin left the firm to set up his sustainability consultancy in 2015, but credits the firm for making him appreciate the importance of a supportive culture. “What the firm gave me was amazing projects to work on,” he says. “We had the opportunity to work on incredible buildings, such as defining the sustainability strategy for the Gherkin.”
The large firms themselves also recognise the value in this. Savills has an alumni network, while CBRE has a “returner” programme to help people come back to the firm if they have left for any number of reasons.
As Appleby argues, the industry is relatively small and, in his line of work as an agent, it helps to be friendly with everyone. He also says it helps that, as a company with a specific target audience, Kontor isn’t really in competition with his former employer. “If they’ve got in early on a building, you want to be front of mind so they give you a call. You’re certainly not going to get that if you’ve been an idiot and left on bad terms,” he says.
And what happens if the tables turn? With five years of growth behind it, Kontor, for example, is now in a position where it has employees who might themselves one day quit and start up a competing business. If that happens, Appleby says: “First I would find out if it’s competing or not, but regardless, life’s too short and it’s only natural that people will probably end up doing that at some point.
“I would genuinely wish them well. I’d love to be able to turn around and say we’ve helped on that journey.”
