Thursday, March 29, 2007

How much do you earn per hour?


Did you know that senior counsel at the planning tribunal earn €2,250 a day and juniors €1,500. That’s around €280 per hour for senior and €190 for junior.

Now, here’s an exercise for you if you're an estate agent: Divide the fee your company got for the last property sale you achieved by the total number of hours spent by different people in the company on bringing about that sale (starting from the day the instruction was won).

So, did you manage to make anywhere near, say, €100 per hour, or was it more like €8.30 (the minimum wage rate)? Perhaps you don’t know how many hours were spent on the sale of that property, and of couse it varies considerably from property to property (and vendor to vendor, more revealingly!). It’s something agents should keep records on – a job diary for each property that vendors could see and from which they would maybe begin to understand for the first time the many, varied and time-consuming tasks that are required to sell a property properly.

And wouldn’t it be interesting to perform this on a macro level – that is, that a number of property firms would perform this analysis on a large enough scale to produce a report that reveals how much on average estate agents are making per hour selling client properties.

This could be an important part of the so-badly-needed public awareness campaign on the work of estate agents.

Of course, most would agree the average rate should not be equal to that of barristers at tribunals or consultants in operating theatres. But the (somewhat less arduous) training, the inate skills, the considerable experience and the specialist knowledge that a good estate agent offers vendors access to, is certainly worth equal to the rates charged by other business professionals offering similar levels of service.

Anyway, something agents might discuss at the IAVI get-together this weekend perhaps?

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