Property consultants advise buyers, sellers, investors and occupiers on deals and markets. This is how to run advisors, analysts and transaction teams when knowledge, credibility and client trust are the product.
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Share your requirementsA property consultancy advises clients on buying, selling, leasing and investing in land, offices, shops and homes. Senior consultants hold client relationships, analysts gather market data and prepare reports, transaction managers handle negotiations and paperwork, and junior staff support research and presentations. Fees come from retainers, advisory mandates and success fees on completed deals. Clients rely on the firm's view of price trends, rents and risks, so a wrong claim or stale data damages credibility. Staff must separate advice from sales: a consultant paid on closing a deal may lean towards it. Work is project-led, with peaks at deal closing and report deadlines. Individuals build personal brands and may leave with clients, so the firm must make its knowledge and relationships belong to the team. 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 property consultants. 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 retainer pays steadily but a success fee may land once a year, and incentives swing with it.
A consultant on a closing bonus is tempted to push a deal that suits the commission more than the client.
A senior consultant who leaves can take mandates, contacts and market views with them.
Junior staff spend nights on market reports and see only the partner's name on the cover.
Old rent and price figures circulate in presentations, and nobody owns updating them.
A closing date brings late nights and weekend calls, followed by a quiet lull that tempts people to leave.
A staff member discusses one client's plans at an event, and another client hears of it.
Staff do not know whether they are judged on revenue, knowledge or client satisfaction.
Start with the topics that matter most here: Compensation, Payroll and Benefits; Performance Management; Career and Succession Management. Then work through the rest. Each topic is written for construction and real estate, not in general.
Salary structure, payroll inputs and a month that closes on time.
Goals, reviews and ratings that hold up in a conversation.
Named backups for the roles that cannot be vacant.
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.
Training planned from need rather than from the calendar.
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.
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.
An HR function that runs the same way every month.
The pieces a property consultants business puts in place, in an order that makes each easier. Open any card for the detail.
A base, a share in team results and a success element, with rules that avoid pressure to close the wrong deal.
A base, a share in team results and a success element, with rules that avoid pressure to close the wrong deal. See compensation benchmarking.
Consultants declare interests, commissions and relationships, taught in onboarding.
Consultants declare interests, commissions and relationships, taught in onboarding.
Mandates, contacts and notes in a shared file, with a second consultant named for each major client.
Mandates, contacts and notes in a shared file, with a second consultant named for each major client. Use employee records for staff-side details.
Name contributors on reports and review analysts' growth every six months.
Name contributors on reports and review analysts' growth every six months. See performance steps.
A named owner and date for updating market figures, and a rule that old figures carry their date.
A named owner and date for updating market figures, and a rule that old figures carry their date.
Criteria that mix revenue, knowledge and client feedback, and a ladder from associate to director.
Criteria that mix revenue, knowledge and client feedback, and a ladder from associate to director.
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.
Pay and incentive design for consultants, set against the market and the fee cycle.
Reviews that value knowledge, client care and revenue, not revenue alone.
Conflict, confidentiality and reporting standards taught from week one.
Keeping teams motivated through deal peaks and lulls.
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.
8 min readRead article
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.
6 min readRead article
A practical design for an IT services appraisal cycle: when to run it, how to rate fairly across projects, and how to explain hikes so they hold.
7 min readRead article
A two-hour exercise that names the roles you could not fill quickly, who could cover them, and what readiness would actually require.
7 min readRead articleMore on the GullyHR blog.
Combine base pay, team share and client feedback, and ban payments tied only to one deal outcome. Ask a qualified professional about disclosure rules.
Spread relationships across two people, record mandates in the firm and reward team service. Ask a qualified professional what restrictions are enforceable.
Credit their work, give development and a path to client-facing roles.
Assign an owner, set a refresh calendar and date every figure.
Write a short rule, train staff and review incidents without blame. Confirm legal duties with a qualified professional.
An incentive structure, a conflict declaration, a promotion ladder and staff records. Legal and regulatory matters go to a qualified professional.
All 109 business types in construction and real estate · Find another business type
See all HR topics for construction and real estate, or another industry.
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