Commercial property people

Please contribute to the next survey (Q1, 2010) by clicking here.

UK property and construction sector recruitment specialists, Prefio.com, have today released the findings of a major survey into employment prospects, compiled from the responses of 1.126 professional property and construction people.
Commenting upon the survey, Tim Latham Prefio’s founding director said “Again, I’m delighted that so many property and construction professionals chose the give us their views. The online survey is really short and simple and as this is the second quarterly survey we can even start to identify tentative trends”.
The main findings were (see also the graphic above):

Overall employment prospects in property & construction

• Overall respondents saw the employment prospects for the property and construction sectors during Q4 (October to December, inclusive) of 2009 as 3.5 on a scale running from 1 (very negative) to 9 (very positive) – so clearly “negative” but a very slight improvement on last quarter.
• No respondents saw the overall outlook as anything better than marginally positive.
• Respondents this time displayed a slightly greater polarity of views – with more positive sentiment from some almost exactly matched by greater pessimism from others.
• 10% of respondents viewed the outlook as neutral.
• Almost 80% saw the overall outlook as negative to a greater or lesser extent.

Employment prospects by specialism

• The real estate specialism was seen as the most positive for employment during the next quarter – possibly due to ther legal wok associated with recovery and distress asset sales.
• The other “net positive” specialisms were viewed as Asset Management and Corporate Real Estate with all others negative.
• No respondents saw Construction as offerring positive prospects during the quarter.

Latham commented “We are great believers in the wisdom of “the crowd” and so we felt that the most accurate forward view for the sector would be achieved by asking a large number of active practitioners for their views. It will be interesting to see how the  rather more positive news being reported in the media during recent weeks will feed into the next quarterly survey.”

One (pessimistic) respondent did comment “I never believe anything until it has been officially denied – we are being told that the economy is stregthening!”

The survey next survey, looking at Q1 of 2010 (January to March inclusive) is now live on the Prefio website at http://prefio.com/survey . It is a very simple web based survey of one small page which takes most respondents less than 30 seconds to complete. Those who are not registered with Prefio.com can secure their copy of the report by inputting to the survey and leaving their email address (but it can also be completed entirely  anonymously).

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