Independent house developers build individual homes on customers' or their own plots, one at a time. This is how to run a small head office, many small sites and a changing set of masons and supervisors.
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Share your requirementsAn independent house developer builds standalone houses, either for owners who bring their own plot or on land the developer holds. The firm may have six to fifteen houses under way across a city, each at a different stage. A site engineer or supervisor often looks after two or three sites, with a head office for design, approvals, estimating and accounts. Masons, carpenters, plumbers and electricians come in gangs and move between sites. The customer is a family with strong opinions, visits often and wants changes midway. Weather, material delays and approvals shift the schedule constantly. Because each house is small, mistakes are expensive relative to the firm's size. For the wider sector, read HR for construction and real estate.
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 independent house developers. 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 person stretched across three sites is missing from two of them each day, and problems wait until the next visit.
A good mason leaves mid-house for a neighbouring builder offering a few more rupees a day.
The owner tells a mason to change a wall position and the engineer finds out after the concrete is poured.
Plumbing is buried before the engineer checks it, because the gang arrived early and the supervisor was elsewhere.
Defect lists, keys, warranties and utility connections are scattered, and the customer keeps calling the site team long after payment.
A capable engineer learns the customers and suppliers and starts building houses on his own.
Material receipts, labour days and customer changes are in a supervisor's diary or phone.
A customer's delayed payment holds up wages and material orders on that one house.
Start with the topics that matter most here: Organisation Design; Employee Administration; Retention and Attrition Management. Then work through the rest. Each topic is written for construction and real estate, not in general.
Structure, reporting lines and who is allowed to decide what.
Records, attendance, leave and the day-to-day HR that must simply work.
Who leaves, when, why — and which of them mattered.
How many people, in which roles, by when — and what they will cost.
Requisition to joining, the same way every time.
A first day that is the same for the fifth joiner as the first.
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.
Two routes — one for complaints, one for conduct — kept separate.
Policies a manager can apply, and obligations with owners and dates.
Induction, records, incident reporting and follow-through.
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.
An HR function that runs the same way every month.
The pieces a independent house developers business puts in place, in an order that makes each easier. Open any card for the detail.
One engineer accountable for each house, with a limit on how many sites one person may carry.
One engineer accountable for each house, with a limit on how many sites one person may carry. Set it out in your organisation design.
A customer change form signed by the engineer before any work changes, with cost and time noted.
A customer change form signed by the engineer before any work changes, with cost and time noted. Keep it in project records.
A short checklist for foundation, plinth, slab, services and finishing, signed by the engineer and the gang lead.
A short checklist for foundation, plinth, slab, services and finishing, signed by the engineer and the gang lead.
Names, trade, rate agreed, attendance and advance, kept by the supervisor and reviewed weekly.
Names, trade, rate agreed, attendance and advance, kept by the supervisor and reviewed weekly. See attendance steps.
A handover folder with drawings, warranties, utility papers and a defect list, and a named person who takes the post-handover calls.
A handover folder with drawings, warranties, utility papers and a defect list, and a named person who takes the post-handover calls.
A path from site engineer to project lead with a share in completed work, so growth is inside the firm.
A path from site engineer to project lead with a share in completed work, so growth is inside the firm. See career 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.
Planning who to hire and when, so crews and teams are ready before the work arrives.
Change forms, stage checklists and handover folders that keep records out of notebooks.
A weekly gang register that supports wage calculation and shows who worked where.
Understanding why skilled people leave and what keeps them.
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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A founder's guide to building job grades, titles and billing levels for a growing IT services firm, with a step-by-step method and a grade description outline.
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Payroll says one joining date, the personal file says another and the manager remembers a third. How to establish a single trustworthy employee record and keep it that way.
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What really keeps mobile app and web developers in a small firm: stay conversations, growth paths, fair release rules and a risk sheet an owner can use this month.
6 min readRead articleMore on the GullyHR blog.
It depends on distance and stage, but two or three nearby sites is a common ceiling. Beyond that, checks slip and problems stay hidden.
Say in the contract that changes go through the engineer, and give customers a simple change form. Tell masons they take instructions only from the site team.
Agree the rate and stage payment in advance, pay on time and keep a bench of known gangs. Last-minute bidding wars are avoided by predictability.
Drawings as built, warranty papers, utility details, a defect list with dates and a contact for post-handover calls. Confirm any statutory papers with a qualified professional.
You cannot fully, but a share in completed houses, growth into a project lead role and fair pay make staying attractive. Ask a qualified professional about what restrictions are lawful.
A site-owner structure, a change form, a gang register template and a handover checklist. Scope, timing and fees are written down in advance.
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