Luxury developers sell on detail: finishes, service and a sense of exclusivity. This is how to run design, site, sales and concierge teams when one scratched surface can undo a very large sale.
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Share your requirementsA luxury property developer builds villas, penthouses or boutique residences for buyers who expect imported finishes, bespoke fittings and personal service. The team is small and senior. Project heads, design managers, quality managers and customer relationship staff work with specialist subcontractors in stone, joinery, glass and lighting, many sourced from outside the city. Sales staff meet buyers over months and carry a lot of trust. Buyers inspect the home many times and flag every flaw. Each apartment is part of a very large purchase, so a delay or defect becomes a personal conflict. Specialist craftsmen are scarce, costly and often engaged project by project. A reputation for finish is the firm's main asset and leaves with its best people. 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 luxury property 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.
One quality manager notices the grout line and the door alignment, and when they are on leave the standard drops.
A single flat is visited again and again, and snag lists grow with each visit, wearing down the handover team.
Stone and joinery teams from outside the city arrive for a project and leave, with no loyalty to the developer.
A salesperson who promised a finish or timeline leaves, and the buyer holds the company to the promise.
Rivals offer a premium title and better pay to a project head who knows the firm's standards.
A buyer calls with a leak six months later and does not know whom to ring.
A project head approves a very costly finish by phone, with no written record of who agreed what.
Buyer names, prices and plans are sensitive, and staff talk freely in the wrong place.
Start with the topics that matter most here: Retention and Attrition Management; HR Operations and Governance; Compensation, Payroll and Benefits. Then work through the rest. Each topic is written for construction and real estate, not in general.
Who leaves, when, why — and which of them mattered.
An HR function that runs the same way every month.
Salary structure, payroll inputs and a month that closes on time.
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.
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.
The pieces a luxury property developers business puts in place, in an order that makes each easier. Open any card for the detail.
A finish guide with photographs and tolerances for each trade, used by supervisors and the snagging team.
A finish guide with photographs and tolerances for each trade, used by supervisors and the snagging team. Keep it in documentation.
Pre-handover inspections at fixed points, with each snag closed and signed, so handover is not the first time defects are found.
Pre-handover inspections at fixed points, with each snag closed and signed, so handover is not the first time defects are found.
Written scope, schedule and finish expectations for each craft team, with a named coordinator from the firm.
Written scope, schedule and finish expectations for each craft team, with a named coordinator from the firm.
A buyer file that logs commitments on finishes and dates, reviewed by the project head.
A buyer file that logs commitments on finishes and dates, reviewed by the project head. Teach the rule in onboarding.
A clear route to larger projects, a share in outcomes and honest conversations about growth.
A clear route to larger projects, a share in outcomes and honest conversations about growth. See compensation benchmarking.
One number and one person for post-handover calls, with a logged response time.
One number and one person for post-handover calls, with a logged response time.
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 finish guide, role descriptions and buyer commitment logs that keep standards steady.
Pay and incentives for senior project and sales staff, set against the market.
Teaching new sales and site staff the firm's standards and promise rules.
Measures for finish quality, handover experience and buyer satisfaction.
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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Simple variable pay structures for product and engineering teams: four options, why individual metrics backfire, a build plan and a one page outline to adapt.
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Write a finish guide, train supervisors on it, inspect at fixed stages and record snags. Relying on one person's eye is risky.
Give them a path to larger work, pay that matches the market and visible credit for results. Ask a qualified professional about lawful restrictions on moving to rivals.
Record every commitment on finishes and dates in the buyer file and have the project head review it monthly.
Inspect before handover, close each snag with a signature and cap the number of visits through a clear process explained to the buyer.
A small desk with one number and logged responses is enough at the start. Scattered calls to site staff cause frustration.
We can help with a finish guide, role maps for senior staff, sales commitment logs and pay benchmarking. Legal and sales-claim questions go to a qualified professional.
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