A developer is several businesses at once: land, approvals, construction, sales and handover. Here is how to run the people side across them.
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Share your requirementsA real estate developer acquires land, secures approvals, builds, sells and hands over homes or commercial space. Different teams handle each stage: acquisition and legal, design and approvals, construction through contractors, marketing and sales through a sales team and brokers, and customer relations after booking. Projects run for years, so teams form, change and disperse over time. The firm often keeps a small permanent core and relies on contractors, consultants and channel partners for much of the work. Sales staff are paid largely on bookings, and customer experience at handover decides reputation. See also HR for construction. What makes HR different here is that a developer is judged by customers and lenders on promises made years apart, so continuity of people, clear roles between sales, construction and handover, and records that outlast any individual matter a great deal.
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.
A new project starts with a new structure and learns the same lessons again.
What sales promises and what construction can deliver meet at handover, with unhappy customers.
Sales staff are credited when a booking is made, and cancellations later are not charged back to the person.
People leave mid-project, and knowledge of commitments and approvals goes with them.
Brokers and agents sell the product with no list of who they are or what they were told.
A handover team is formed late and inherits complaints it did not cause.
The status of each approval is known to one person, and the dates leave with them.
Start with the topics that matter most here: Organisation Design; Performance Management; Career and Succession 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.
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.
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.
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 real estate developers business puts in place, in an order that makes each easier. Open any card for the detail.
Who owns land, approvals, construction, sales and handover, and where they meet, with a named owner for the whole customer journey.
What this coversHideWho owns land, approvals, construction, sales and handover, and where they meet, with a named owner for the whole customer journey. The organisation design work sets it.
Credit and incentive counted on bookings that stay, with a written rule for cancellations.
What this coversHideCredit and incentive counted on bookings that stay, with a written rule for cancellations. The performance management process covers the design.
A project file of what was promised, approved and delivered, held by the firm, not a person.
What this coversHideA project file of what was promised, approved and delivered, held by the firm, not a person.
Who sells for you, what they are told and how they are paid.
What this coversHideWho sells for you, what they are told and how they are paid.
A customer relations team in place before bookings, not after complaints.
What this coversHideA customer relations team in place before bookings, not after complaints.
A named successor for the project director and head of sales on each long project.
What this coversHideA named successor for the project director and head of sales on each long project. The succession plan names them.
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 structure across land, construction, sales and handover with a single owner for the customer journey.
Sales credit that counts bookings that hold and a review that includes how the sale was explained.
A named successor for the roles whose loss would stall a long project.
Clear rules and records for commitments, channel partners and approvals.
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
A flat structure works until the founder becomes the only route to a decision. How to tell when you have passed that point, and how to redesign without a reorganisation.
8 min readRead article
A review can only judge what was agreed beforehand. How to set expectations that are specific, written and revisited, so the review stops being a surprise.
5 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.
Because what was promised at sale is not always known to those who build and hand over. A project file of commitments and one owner of the customer journey close most of the gap.
With a written rule: credit counts when the booking holds, and cancellations are charged back in the way the scheme states. Confirm the statutory treatment with a qualified professional.
Yes. They sell on your behalf, and you need to know who they are, what they were told and how they are paid.
Keep commitments, approvals and decisions in a project file, name successors for key roles and hold handovers when people move.
Before bookings, so customers meet the people who will look after them and issues are logged from the start.
A small central team with standard templates, plus a named person on each project. Standardisation saves a lot of rebuilding.
Time would go on how teams are formed for each project, how sales credit treats bookings that later cancel, and whether channel partners appear in any record. A sensible first piece of work could be a written role map across land, construction, sales and handover. When we finish talking, we put the proposed scope and fees in writing for you to approve.
Name a customer relations owner from booking, keep a log of promises and updates, and share progress honestly. Surprises at handover come from silence in between.
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