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Real Estate Finance and the New Norm

William Dodds | Cobalt Recruitment

Article posted by William Dodds

​With things seemingly ‘picking up’ it is interesting to hear how real estate finance teams are defining this. Prior to the announcement yesterday, Offices were re-opening weekly, with a clear push to bring teams back together face to face to continue collaboration and projects to what seemed like an eternity ago, and finally not having to screen share endless excel documents. It will be interesting to see if teams have utilised this time, but also gear to the new norm which will most likely be a split between work from home and office regime.

Real Estate has always relied on key finance individuals to keep businesses in line with budgets and this has not changed. It is great to hear that developments are back up and running, rent collections increasing and a huge appetite for investors to seek out the next transaction, creating a clearly competitive and exciting market. This is leading to companies wanting to recruit, however, held back by still some level of uncertainty, ultimately waiting for the green light in order to get the ball rolling.

Over the last few months, we have seen a push for transactional finance level hires to continue with the chasing overdue payments and monitoring of invoices coming through. It has also been interesting to hear how teams have adjusted to onboarding new team members remotely to ensure business operations can resume as normal and continue supporting key units.

Looking to the future and what is clear to gain is the need for the ‘finance function’ to be a much more crucial part of the organisational structure, with all levels getting full exposure beyond the monthly reporting. We are noticing hiring managers targeting commercially minded accountants to business partner key stakeholders and play a pivotal part in company growth and key decision making.

With the final quarter of the year on the horizon and ‘front office’ functions gearing up to invest, this will definitely have a knock-on effect across finance teams within the real estate space at all levels, subsequently creating some very positive noises. Although some of the large institutions are outsourcing a number of functions, the need for newly qualified (ACA/ACCA/CIMA) profiles has never been stronger with a hunger to learn and develop, as well as those that want to roll their sleeves up and get involved with everything from building models from scratch, implementing new accounting systems and redefining the month & quarter-end processes.

We are very much looking forward to October – December being the busiest time of the year, where we can continue to help companies build exceptionally high-calibre finance teams, allowing new starters can join early 2021 and get companies stepping into the new year with their best foot forward.

If you would like to hear which companies are striving for a positive 2021, please feel free to reach out to me directly.

We’re here if you need help defining a role or brief, specialist insight to help shape your ideas or expert help with your recruitment process. Just get in touch to arrange a conversation with one of the team or if you’re ready for us to find the perfect person for you, send us your brief.

If you’re looking for your ideal job send your CV to us to get started or search for the latest job vacancies and we’ll get the ball rolling.

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