Director - Jeremy Payne

Property seems to be the repository for really nice people and checked shirts, as we came across both a lot during filming!

Unlike many of the industries we covered property seems to have retained a civility of lifestyle where you don’t have to kiss goodbye to your life in order to do well and make a tidy living. It’s bonus orientated which always brings with it the prospect of huge rewards and jobs tend to come with a full suite of perks including company cars and all of the standard healthcare provisions.

It’s a job that often gets you out and about so you’re not always stuck behind a desk and it’s increasingly international, so plenty of travelling if you want it. One big plus is that you’re not tied to London in the same way you would be in an industry such as Investment Banking. So whilst many applicants will want to come to the capital to start their careers, many industry stars are based in the regions.

You’ll want to really love property, land and buildings though as some of the work can be pretty mundane and you’re unlikely to get quite the same buzz, excitement and glamour as a few of the other industries we covered.

Salaries are good in property and as mentioned previously if you get a bonus you’ll be able to challenge the lawyers and bankers. New starters in London can expect a salary in the region of 30K (25K out of London), after about 8 years you’ll be knocking on 100K in London (75K out of London).

Who are you and what do you do?

My name is Jeremy Payne and I am a director of DTZ and I am based in our Birmingham office.  DTZ is a global firm of real estate advisers with offices all around the world but we were originally founded in the UK and were based in our UK offices in London.

What is Property?

We advise people on the use of land and buildings in the environments that we live in, broadly.  Different parts that our profession can have a different focus whether it is from an end user point of view from a builder point of view or from a government point of view.

What attracted you to this career?

When I was at school, I was looking to get an idea of what I wanted to do, I hadn’t really got any preconceived ideas and some of the things I was looking for was working with people, working outside, I quite enjoyed being out in the fresh air I didn’t really like being stuck behind a desk so I got an interest in the construction industry and spent some time looking at builders and getting work experience with builders and people in the construction industry and also in the property profession and luckily I was able to get some experience in this firm, actually, and came here whilst still at school, went away found out what degrees to do to get me in the industry and here I am now 30 years later.

What does your job involve?

I now run a team of professional valuers and surveyors, about 25 people based here in Birmingham.  I have to deal with clients, I have to get involved in winning contracts for my team to work on, I supervise the delivery service and supervise the work that goes on a day to day basis in the team I run the finances and make sure our bills are paid and collected and so on and deliver a level of turnover to my UK managing director.  I have had other roles in the business; I have been doing this one for about a year, having come back from a different role in our business. 

Describe the process of your work?

In the broadest sense we provide advice on land and buildings, their use, the environment around them and their development and how they can be improved, I focus down on the specific area which is to do with what they are worth what their value is but we have other people in our office who provide all sorts of different advice on different aspects of land, buildings, property and can range from residential property to agricultural property to office buildings, factories to shops, that sort of thing.

What do you do on a typical day?

It is a mix but obviously you have to be quite organised in terms of making sure that 25 people have got something to do, so I spend some time first thing in the morning with the team ensuring people have got the day worked out, what they are going to do what they are going to provide what they are going to look at.  I then spend some time telephoning clients speaking to them or maybe going to visit them and if I get the chance if I am lucky I now get the chance to go out of the office to look at property but sadly as I have gone up through the structure you don’t get so much opportunity to get out of the office, you would lower down.  Then I supervise and look at the work and review the work that has been done, sign off work that sort of thing.  We have quite a strong due diligence and regulatory risk assessment process to ensure the work we do is carried out properly so I sign off that and I get to network with a lot of other professionals in our business, there is an awful lot of people, involvement in people engagement in the profession.

What are the speicialisms within your industry?

Apart form the difference between public and private sector, and there is a clear distinction you have to make then you start chopping it down into proper types so you get people who specialise in different types of property, residential, commercial property, shops, industrial or land agricultural.  Then you get people who are specifically focused on the construction side of it, we call them building surveyors and quantity surveyors and they focus on how things are put together and how they are really built.

Interviewer: So what are the job roles within that, are there just surveyors or are there other roles as well?

The term consultant is getting used more and more now but they are usually surveyors, chartered surveyors are a fairly strong brand now and that comes through from the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors so really chartered surveyors is the bit that is underneath the whole thing and beyond that you could be a director a partner a firm or a manager in a Government department so you get all sorts of job titles coming through in depending on the different pats of the industry you are in

You looked at our office for example we have people who provide highly professional work sometimes on a consultancy basis sometimes on a results basis they are giving very detailed professional advice to people on rent reviews and lease renewals or value of property or the value of a development.  On the other had we also have people who are very focused on marketing and selling or leasing property and the strategies you would use to achieve the best results in that area they have to work with professional people so we share the advice we are giving.  We have people advise people who want to invest in property, so fund managers, banks, Government organisations, a lot of the big pension funds we advise on acquiring investment property.  We have people who focus on residential and do quite a lot of analysis on market trends we have researchers, who are totally dedicated to market analysis and so there is a wide variety of different skill areas that we can offer people when you join our business you can spend the first two years experiencing all those different areas and deciding which way you want to do, I should add that we have people that manage property which is really important so you understand what goes on in a day to day basis, they collect rent, which is important if you have invested in property and they make sure the tenants are happy getting what they want and sometimes sorting out their problems for them so there is a wide range of things to do.

What are the best bits about your job?

Well now it is a bit of cliché but the people are most important but now I get the biggest kick out of seeing our younger people develop their career that is actually the best bit, we have some very talented young people coming into our business and it is right from the moment when you interview them, you engage them, you get them on board to have seen them achieve things and develop and grown and actually most of the time leave my bit of the business and go off and do other things elsewhere but it is really exciting to see where they get to and how successful they can be as well so  that is where I am now really.

What are the worst bits about your job?

Sometimes it can get mundane I think probably one of the worst things is dealing with difficult people and that requires a degree of tact and respect for certain people and their opposing views but you inevitably get some conflict, people disagree with your opinions and that sort of thing so actually that is one of the toughest things and certainly I am encouraging our young people to face up to some of those difficult phone calls those difficult situations they have with people sometimes, but I am afraid that probably goes with any professional life, you have to deal with those hard bits as well.

What has been your greatest achievement?

In terms of specific project delivery, I was involved in advising the master plan for the redevelopment of the centre of Birmingham which has now manifested itself in the Galway Shopping Centre and it is going to go on through the rest of Birmingham.  So as a specific project that was something that I was very proud of.  In a more general sense in terms of my career I became our UK managing director six years ago which is one down from being on our holdings board, being the PLC director, and I was responsible for the whole of the UK business and actually moved down to London and worked there for five years.  We employed about 1600 people we turned over £150m so personally that was the peak although I would say that in professional services you can go into a management position and after a time you start to think well actually I would quite like to get back to doing what I did before and which I was trained to do which is to delivery products and services and work on projects and work on clients so after five years the opportunity came for me to move back to the old part of the business and actually the absolute summit of that was that I was very heavily involved in acquiring a business that we wanted to bolt on to our existing business and I did that as my sort of swan song that was the last think I did as a managing director and I have now come back into the main stream of the business again.

Any regrets?

It is easy to say I would have liked to have travelled more but I think when I started in our profession there weren’t the opportunities to travel around the world or certainly it wasn’t as easy, you could but you had to push a lot harder to get opportunities overseas and to get a wider scope of things going on and I started in Birmingham and I management get to do work in London but I was based in Birmingham, nowadays youngsters joining our profession really do get to go all over the place, it really is very global and it is fantastic to hear their experiences, and I think I missed that bit so I would have liked to have done a bit more of that.

What is the pay like and are there any perks?

The pay is comparable with most other professions there are some big perks available if you are prepared to work hard and get yourself in the right positions. It is bonus orientated so you can get big bonuses if you perform well or if you are successful.  That is certainly true in the private sector although I shouldn’t rule out the fact that I should point out there are number of property professionals who work in public organisations and work for Government and that sort of thing their remuneration is much more salary focused but is higher obviously to attract them to come into those jobs.  In terms of perks obviously travel, even if it is more local it is a very strong networking profession and there is a lot of meeting other professionals and meeting other people not just locally, but going around the UK we have conferences regularly around the UK and that to me was one of the attractions to it. 

Graduates would start at around 30-32k in a regional office it would be more like 25-26k and then you move quite rapidly, and I think that is something that has changed quite rapidly over the course of my career, people seem to be able to develop themselves much more quickly so you would be to associate director or director role certainly before the age of 30 now and once you are up to director level now you would be at a basic salary of 70-75k and in London you would be up to 100k. 

Interviewer: That is comparable to the city

Yes we have to be competitive to attract the right quality people and we do drive our business on the basis that we want to attract upper quartile graduates and so on and people with foreign languages is always useful and to attract those sort of people we really do need to pay good salaries.  It is very competitive out there and we don’t want to take second best we want to have enthusiastic people who are turned on by the money as well as the career opportunities. 

How long is a working day and do you have to work out of hours?

It is interesting, one observation is that there is a much stronger work ethic in London without a doubt and most of our very ambitious people end up in London and then go abroad and experience wider things and quite often come back to a local office but the work ethic in London is stronger, they do work hard down there in London.  In the regional office I think the quality of life is better you don’t have to put up with all that commuting and that sort of thing, so I think people work harder in a different way in a regional office, they can be much more out and about obviously.  We don’t work very often at weekends sometimes if you are going abroad or travelling a long way to see a client you might find you are coming back on a Saturday or even a Sunday night or something like that.  We do work sometimes long into the evening but not very often and not as often as some of the lawyers and accountancy professional.

Is there much in the way of travel?

Certainly in the UK yes we do have, we cover from a professional point of view, a large area and we do go to most parts of England from Birmingham into Wales, we have offices in Scotland who deal with Scotland so from a specific job point of view you are travelling almost every day certainly at low levels you are.  We have national conferences, I am travelling to London once a week at least and I have colleagues in other regional offices who are doing the same amount of travelling to London as well.  So there is quite a lot of travelling.

Interviewer: And abroad?

Abroad, not so much from a professional point of view again we have European conferences and one of the focuses we have in our business is on managing clients and managing clients requires you now, in the global world, when your client is global to go abroad and help them with project overseas.  So I have had the opportunity to go to America and look after clients there, I haven’t been over to the far east yet, but that is one of my ambitions, I have just got a project on in Germany at the moment so Frankfurt is being visited soon.

Do you have to be based anywhere in particular?

Provincial cities certainly attract the major firms in our profession, most of them have offices in most of the provincial cities around the UK but that doesn't mean to say that you have to be successful in our industry just working for big firms in their provisional or London offices, I mean there are successful people in the property world who work for developers and work for property companies who might be based in rural locations and there is a big move in terms of environmental issues and quite often you find companies in our profession are moving out and locating themselves on business parks or out in the country and that sort of thing.  So you can be quite rural, it is nice there is a good spread.

What is the working environment like?

DTZ’s culture is quite formal, we don’t adopt the same sort of casual dress as perhaps the more artistic people in our business, the architects and people like that I think are a bit more casual. We deal with clients and clients expect us to be formal in the way that we dress.  That is not to say that we don’t have days when we are very casual if I am going to spend the whole day out of the office in the car, I am going to wear jeans and a t-shirt so it is not that rigid.  You just have to dress according to the circumstances.

We are quite a young organisation but we keep people going well on through their 60s so we don’t just throw people out early on.  In terms of the male female split, inevitably people like to do better on that front, I think we are broad minded about it and there are lots of girls coming into our profession now and it is really quite exciting they add an awful lot to it so I think we have got a lot better in that respect but we are probably not up at the same sort of level of male female ratios as the solicitors.  They seem to have cracked it, we haven’t quite got there yet, it is still a bit male dominated.

How did you get into your job?

When I started looking in more detail to property as a profession I was guided towards the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors which is our professional body, they are very well set up in careers advice and if you go on their website or telephone them they will get you going on the property profession as a whole and so I did that, I found out where I could go on degree courses and various, not just degree courses you can do other sort of qualifications as well, to get to RICS qualification.  I investigated that, I actually went to Sheffield Polytechnic and did a disagree there and them came back to Birmingham and started working in Birmingham but the RICS are very much the father figure in this they guide people through it and they are very well structured and again they are becoming global and are focusing on recruiting people from all around the world and as a company we actually encourage Cambridge University to take on Chinese graduates because we have got offices in China and we want to populate them with our RICS qualified people  so we are actually supporting people to go to Cambridge, get a RICS qualification and then go back to our Chinese offices.  So it is going all around the world now.

Interviewer: And what if you had done a degree in say English or history degree?

You can easily transfer or change, certainly some degrees have more relevance to property things like geography, economics business studies, those are pointing more towards the property industry in terms of a degree, but that is not to say, in our day to day working life, I wouldn’t deny that you have to be numeric, there is a certain amount of number work and we have to deliver reports of quite detailed technical documents which have to be written so there is an English focus there as well so you need to be a good all rounder really.

When you come into the profession and you are thinking about what degree to do, quire often people do a non property related degree and either get that degree and then do a Masters in property is quite common now, in fact more than half of our graduate intake will have done a different degree to property degree and then taken a Masters and come and joined us and sometimes people have joined us without a property degree at all and without a Masters and we do take people who will do a correspondence course of some sort of day release course to get a masters so there are various ways of coming in without necessarily a property related degree.

What's the application process like?

We have an online graduate application on the system, we invite people to join in the November every year and we go through a number of assessments, processes, interviews and so on and we would confirm a graduate position in April, May and that is subject to somebody getting their degree and they would start with us in September and we are pretty much, the big firms are all sort of run as a pack and it is a little bit competitive but we are roughly all following the same timescale.  The other thing you can do is get work experience and that is brilliant and it helps us in assessing people if somebody has come to us and got work experience in the holidays then at least we have got to know them when they do apply through the graduate recruitment.  Equally you can come into the profession without a degree because actually there is a school leaver scheme now where you can go and join a firm who sponsor you to go through night school and you can get an RICS qualification that way, so we are not totally exclusively graduate degree qualified focused, there are other ways into the profession as well, but then work experience really does help as well and it doesn't really matter if it is not with DTZ, it is just interesting talking to people who have got work experience, working in any sort of area in our industry so they might of worked for firm of builders, so somebody knows how a building is put up it helps it all gives them a deeper background.  The standards are quite high but that is not to say there are positions that would suit anybody, so there are positions in local government or smaller firms or you could go into a specialism you could go into agricultural property or residential property or commercial focus so there is lots of different opportunities in different operations.

What are the key skills required for your job?

I think we are not particularly design orientated in my part of the property industry, you need to go into the architectural side of things if you are interested in things that are too arty and design focused.  As I said already, said numeracy is important, I always say the most important quality is having good communication skills, you have to talk to people you have to be able to get on with people you have to be able to find out information and you have to assess that information once you have got it so I always say communication and common sense are the most important things.

What's your top tip for breaking into your industry?

If you can demonstrate that you have got some experience and you understand a bit about the practical side of the profession, that counts for an awful lot I think people who come to apply who have fantastic academic qualifications but have no practical focus at all find it difficult it is a very practical world we work in it is all about making things and creating things.  It is all very well having the theory but if you don’t understand the practice it doesn’t work.

What's the career progress and how quickly can you move up the career ladder?

It is more so and a shame in a way and one of the things that we do to try and break that formulaic impression up is overseas travel so we do encourage to go abroad on secondment, we do second people to clients as well and we try and get people to go and work in different departments and teams.  Certainly at the early end of your career when you join us as a graduate, you have to do two years of probationary time which is when you gather experience at different parts of our business and then you take a final exam to get the RICS qualification and during those two years people have to move around and work in different departments so they can get a feel for the different aspects of the business and then as I said, once you go beyond that we do encourage people to go and get experience in other parts of the world or other parts of the business.  So we break up the formulaic bit but having said that inevitably and I think this goes for anybody you have certain targets in your own life and you say in five years time I want to be there or I want to be doing this, and I am afraid that happens with anybody so there is a bit of that formulaic progression that goes on.

How does the role change over time?

You join us as a graduate, this is normally, but as I said we do take on pre-graduate sometimes, you get your RICS qualification, normally within two years, you then become a surveyor, for some consultancy parts of our business you become a consultant.  You then become senior surveyor after a couple of years, or senior consultant, you then move on after two or three years to become an associate director and then two, three or four years after that, a director.  That would take you to the age of around 30 and there you go.  Once you have become a director we kind of channel people into focusing on managing a business, also managing clients and that is really important we actually have quite a few people who are dedicated to managing a client relationship.  Then we have people who are focused specifically on a technical skill area and running a technical skill area, so actually you start branching off in a different way once you get to director level. But you have management responsibilities, that is the key thing.

Where do you see the industry going?

I'm afraid I am labouring the point about overseas, it is becoming more global, a lot of our graduates that we take on do have a second language, it is not essential you can go to eastern Europe and get away with English completely because all the professional people out there speak English so it is not a prerequisite, but certainly overseas is the big thing and we are growing our business in China, India, United States massively at the moment, those are the big growth area for us so sending people out to those office for a short or long period of time is a key part of developing our business.  Having inculcating the culture of DTZ, in the UK environment, moving them out overseas is a great way of developing a business.

Is there scope for movement during or after this career?

Obviously there are people who go off on maternity leave and that sort of thing but we do encourage people to go and look at other things certainly after a period of time, if they have been with us for more than ten years, we allow three month secondments and allow people to go off and have breaks and that sort of thing, and that is taken up pretty regularly.  That is part of being a responsible employee in the professional world now it is quite high pressured so you have to allow people to let of steam and go away after a period of time,

Interviewer: And what about if you have decided you don’t want to work in property any more, do you have lots of transferable skills?

Personally, the experience I got from the managing role was great and I know I could go off and do another management role, it was fantastic, I was lucky in that I was given the management role with the responsibility.  But in the big property world you can go off and work for a property developer, which is building things basically, developing things, you can get into public sector, you can get into quasi public sector so some of the development corporations around the country and certainly people go into those areas and work in that part of the industry.  So land and property is a broad enough mix of things for people to go and apply different skills it is not just focused on property.

What are the industry resources that someone interested in joining must know about?

Certainly it starts off with how you want to start off in a career in property, the RICS, there are two main publications, there is the Estates Gazette and Property Week and if you read those two journals they will give you all the information you need, you will see it on every page what is going on in industry, lots of background, lots of articles, lots of current events of news and some stuff about careers as well so the Estates Gazette in particular is very strong and they are all available on line as well so you can get to see them on the internet.

If you weren't in this career, what would you be doing?

Well I like people and I like dealing with people so I think I would have ended up in some sort of management position looking after people. I get a kick out of seeing people make a success of their career and that is part of the management process so that is what I like, dealing with people and making sure they are getting something out of developing themselves.