From Bali holiday to red-eye dash to meet isolation curfew
As a wise man once emailed me “A week is a long time in politics and a day is a long time in real estate” and I have to eat my words from last week’s article (which to be fair I had written 3 weeks prior) where I stated “nothing just changes overnight”.
Well YES it does and we have since seen that in the current climate my statement was entirely inaccurate – sorry!
As someone who was merely glancing at the government updates from a variety of pool clubs and restaurants across Bali with my brother and a girlfriend from Melbourne a fortnight ago, to only then partake in a jam-packed-full Qantas red-eye dash home to beat the “isolation” curfew on Sunday 15th March, I know all too well now that in life and business, things CAN change overnight.
Whilst my team and I had been working at BAU (business as usual) with some stringent social-distancing and sanitisation practices in place during what I will call week one (9th – 13th March), as a team aged between 27 and 44, to their credit, they had been calm and focused on serving our clients and candidates without question, and addressing calls and questions well beyond the 8/8:30am – 5:30/6pm work day.
However with our ability to operate meetings and interviews online, and much of our role being on the phones, our thriving mother industry “Real Estate” hasn’t fared quite as well.
We’ve had major national clients put roles on hold, as well as some local state based roles.
We’re proud to say that most companies are seeing this as a temporary “blip”, where staff will still be required on deck in the coming weeks and therefore have at this stage continued to interview and issue Letters of Offer – mainly in Strata and PropTech.
Obviously most are moving to facetime, WhatsApp or Zoom interviews rather than face to face, albeit until Friday 27th March it had still been 50/50.
We are hoping to speak with both traditional and tech clients this week to see how everyone is faring, and come back next week with some insights on what PropTech vs traditional Real Estate agencies are experiencing during this time.