Real estate and construction

The built environment just re-built itself

By PropertyTalents

2022 will be the year we’ll long remember. Many of us expected the world to return to normality at the beginning of 2021. Vaccines were starting to roll out, and many executives felt like it would be a matter of a few months before we would all return to the workplace to fully enjoy the friendly kitchen chats and more effective face-to-face solutions to business challenges.

Sadly, this was not the case.

The global pandemic opened the Pandora box for the built environment industry, investors, owners and occupiers have all needed to re-think their respective business models, modus operandi, and often leave their comfort zone forever.

The volatility of work will only increase in 2022. New Covid variants will continue to emerge and may cause workplaces to temporarily go remote. The shift to hybrid work will create more unevenness when it comes to where, when, and how much employees are working. Employees are facing lower cost-of-living wages, which will affect their real wages. A lot of big changes are coming. It’s important to think about how they will affect your organization and strategy.

As if a pandemic wasn’t enough

“All war is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal.”, wrote John Steinbeck.

We cannot avoid the most recent events in the east of Europe (the article was finalised on 25 February 2022). There are other experts much better prepared to make a far-reaching analysis. Still, there is no doubt that any further escalation of the situation could have a huge impact on the Polish built environment and inflict at least stagnation or decline of development activities, expansion plans and as a result possible reductions of their teams in Poland.

Commercial real-estate sectors of highest resilience

As has been widely observed and commented, the top two asset classes that have been gaining momentum in the last challenging years are:

Industrial (warehouses, logistics facilitates) and
Residential real estate (both for the primary market as well as for institutional rent).

That is confirmed by our current portfolio of mandates for the Polish market. Land acquisition, leasing or sales, project management – these are the functions that are in high demand; the selection processes for roles related to these areas are even more challenging. Decision-makers are often willing to go an extra mile in the recruitment process via what could be called ‘human capital due diligence’.

So, if you are not professionally active in the Industrial or residential asset classes but would like to be the ‘asset shift’, we have good news for you. This is possible and we have had a number of such shifts. Often, this is of high value for both the company and for the candidate. The company can get a fresh look at its business and ingenious solutions to challenges traditionally treated as ‘hard-to-impossible’. And the candidate has a chance to rejuvenate their brain cells, creating new neuronal connections at the crossroads of previous experience and idiosyncrasies of the new asset type.

How does it look like at PropertyTalents?

Our interaction with candidates is based on a set of constantly improving best practices. Some of these best practices we made of our DNA. We are committed to stick to the following tenet:

We assess candidates for their potential by evaluating their results against their experience and market conditions, both present and anticipated
We look at candidates in terms of how they utilise strengths, skills and personality traits acquired over the years as we believe that they should be using a majority of them daily to succeed, stay relevant and achieve desired results
We value candidates who possess qualities relevant to the business space they intend to work in

Another part is that PropertyTalents focuses on verticals of the real estate industry, as well as the adjacent industries that collectively make up the human-made environment that provides the setting for human activity, such as construction, architecture, building materials, retail and engineering.

For us at PropertyTalents, recruitment activity is just a way to identify and bring value to our business partners. We look upon the recruitment activity with an aim to provide our clients with quality people and in turn improve their organisation.

The built environment is a complex mesh of independent industries that permeates our modern world, including the fields of real estate, investment, engineering, materials science, architecture and construction. Pursuing careers in any of these fields naturally requires a good understanding of the others. PropertyTalents is a one-stop shop where these different skills meet and synergies emerge. Therefore, we have decided to put these best practices together in our Candidate Interaction Manifesto and Client Interaction Manifesto. We encourage you to check them out and share your opinions with us.

For more information, contact us at:

o: +48 22 389 6770
e: BPCC@propertytalents.com

EU offices:
DACH: berlin@propertytalents.com
Benelux: amsterdam@propertytalents.com
Scandinavia: stockholm@propertytalents.com
Czechia: czech.republic@propertytalents.com
Bulgaria: bulgaria@propertytalents.com
Hungary: hungary@propertytalents.com

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