A commercial real estate business owns or manages offices, malls and business parks. It needs leasing staff, facility teams and tenant desks. This is how to staff each side and keep tenants and people satisfied.
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Share your requirementsA commercial real estate company owns, leases and manages offices, retail centres, business parks and warehouses. It has an asset management and leasing team, a finance and rent collection desk, and a facility team that runs lifts, power, water, security and housekeeping, much of it through vendors. Tenants expect a building that works every day, so facility staff are the face of the company. Leasing staff handle negotiations with occupiers over months. Vendor staff on the premises, such as guards and cleaners, are not on your payroll but represent you. Night and weekend coverage is needed, and small failures such as a lift stoppage affect many tenants at once. For the wider sector, read HR for the construction industry.
These are the places the people side of this kind of business tends to give way. The rest of this page works through them.
HR here has to work for each of these groups, not only the office. The set-up below is written with all of them in mind.
GullyHR runs talent acquisition for permanent roles in commercial real estate. For each role we agree the job description with you, find and screen candidates against it, and support the offer through to joining. Tell us the role and the number of people, and we start there.
We recruit permanent employees. We do not supply contract or temporary staff.
Every business interviews, but few have a written process that works the same way for every role and every interviewer. GullyHR designs yours, from the role brief to the offer, trains your managers to run it, and can run it for you on the roles you hand us.
We agree what the role must deliver, the must-have and nice-to-have skills, and how each will be scored.
Screening call, assessment, interview rounds and decision points, sized to the role and the number of people you hire.
Structured questions for each role family and a rating guide, so two interviewers judge the same answer the same way.
A short briefing for your managers on what to ask, what to avoid and how to give a clear yes or no.
Who approves, how the offer is made, and how candidates are kept informed from first call to joining.
A rude guard or dirty washroom is blamed on the building, though the person is not yours.
One technician is called at night for every fault, and he leaves.
Promises made to tenants during leasing are unknown to the team that must deliver them.
A new agency brings new people, and standards fall for months.
They reach the owner directly, and the facility team hears late.
Staff chase overdue tenants without guidance on tone or escalation.
A fire alarm or power failure at night finds one guard and no plan.
Staff change often, and training is repeated without record.
Start with the topics that matter most here: HR Operations and Governance; Employee Relations; Health, Safety and Wellbeing. Then work through the rest. Each topic is written for construction and real estate, not in general.
An HR function that runs the same way every month.
Two routes — one for complaints, one for conduct — kept separate.
Induction, records, incident reporting and follow-through.
How many people, in which roles, by when — and what they will cost.
Structure, reporting lines and who is allowed to decide what.
Requisition to joining, the same way every time.
A first day that is the same for the fifth joiner as the first.
Records, attendance, leave and the day-to-day HR that must simply work.
Salary structure, payroll inputs and a month that closes on time.
Goals, reviews and ratings that hold up in a conversation.
Training planned from need rather than from the calendar.
Named backups for the roles that cannot be vacant.
Communication, recognition and the conditions people actually work in.
Policies a manager can apply, and obligations with owners and dates.
Who leaves, when, why — and which of them mattered.
Resignation to relieving letter, in a defined order.
Records that survive people, and approvals that do not queue.
A short monthly pack management actually reads.
The pieces a commercial real estate business puts in place, in an order that makes each easier. Open any card for the detail.
Dress, conduct, tenant handling and reporting lines in the vendor contract, with a joint induction.
Dress, conduct, tenant handling and reporting lines in the vendor contract, with a joint induction. See onboarding.
A shared roster for technicians with rest and fixed rates, under attendance and shift rules.
A shared roster for technicians with rest and fixed rates, under attendance and shift rules.
A summary sheet for each tenant covering fit-out, access and service terms.
A summary sheet for each tenant covering fit-out, access and service terms.
A log with time, owner and closure, and a monthly review, aligned to the grievance process.
A log with time, owner and closure, and a monthly review, aligned to the grievance process.
A reminder sequence, wording and escalation path for rent staff.
A reminder sequence, wording and escalation path for rent staff.
Drills for fire, lift entrapment and power failure, with a call list.
Drills for fire, lift entrapment and power failure, with a call list. Safety routines set the steps.
Before changing anything, find out what is true today. These checks take an afternoon and tell you which of the topics above to start with.
Share your requirementsConfirm with a qualified professional. What applies to you depends on your business, your state and your arrangements, and it changes. This page describes practice. It does not state a legal position.
The services below fit this kind of business best. Each starts by recording where you stand, and every later report compares against that. We do not promise outcomes.
A joint induction for your staff and vendor staff on tenant service.
On-call and night roster rules for technicians and security.
A complaint log and fair route for tenant and staff issues.
Emergency drills and safe working routines for building staff.
Start with a free conversation, or see the paid HR Diagnostic.
Understand the business, its workforce, current processes and HR challenges.
Find the missing, weak, inconsistent or person-dependent processes.
Create the structure, processes, policies, SOPs, dashboards and systems needed.
Help HR and department managers actually adopt the new system.
Digitise repetitive and approval-based workflows where it is worth doing.
Track hiring, attendance, employee cost, performance, training and attrition.
Strengthen the people-management system continuously, not once.
From the GullyHR blog: one on HR in construction and real estate, and one on each of the topics this page points to.
Site engineers, supervisors, crews and sales teams leave for different reasons. How to ask what shaped their decision and act on it between projects.
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Every growing company reaches a point where the founder approving everything stops being speed and starts being the bottleneck. Twelve signs it has happened, and what to fix first.
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An employee brings you a complaint about their supervisor. What happens next should not depend on who is in the room. A grievance procedure a small company can actually run.
8 min readRead article
A shift, weekly and monthly safety routine for rubber plants that names who checks platen guards, mill trip bars, autoclave doors, burst-test cages and slings, and who acts on near misses.
7 min readRead articleMore on the GullyHR blog.
The contract sets this, but tenants will blame you. Have a qualified professional review the terms and include conduct standards.
Build a roster with a backup, fix an on-call rate and give rest after night calls.
Give facility staff a one-page summary of each new tenant's terms and meet monthly.
Use a written sequence with tone guidance and a set point for escalation.
Pay on time, give a clear supervisor and keep training short and recorded.
We would look at the vendor standards, the on-call roster and the complaint log. Scope, timing and fees are written down so you know what you are buying.
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