Ketan Gajjar: Hello and welcome to the Recruitment Coverage show. This is your host, Ketan Gajjar, and I’m happy to be joined today by Joshua Prince. Joshua is the director at Eastwood Investment Group. Joshua, welcome to the show.
Joshua Prince: Thank you. Thanks for having me, Ketan.
Ketan Gajjar: Pleasure. Joshua, can you tell us a bit about yourself and your journey in the real estate and recruiting industry?
Joshua Prince: Sure. I’ve been working in the real estate industry on and off for almost 20 years. And actually even longer if I include working while I was still at school on a Saturday at an estate agent. And I’ve started. In commercial property focusing on acquiring land that could be redeveloped for either residential or commercial.
I did that for quite some time until we had the banking crisis around 2008. I got made redundant. I’d worked in real estate for a little bit longer for myself before jumping over into a family business into recruitment where we met. And I worked at that business in the recruitment sector for around seven or so years where I learned lots of lots of skills in and across the recruitment business as a whole, not just the sales part which also included some elements of real estate and M& A before jumping back over into real estate in 2016 and setting up my now business, which is called Eastwood.
And we Eastwood focus again on acquiring land throughout the UK where we can add value predominantly through getting planning permission or through asset management and through development. [00:02:00] But the skills in I found the skills in both sectors, real estate and recruitment there’s a lot of crossover.
So sorry for rambling, but hopefully that makes sense.
Ketan Gajjar: Oh, totally. And that was my next question, real estate and recruitment. So what skills, did you find in terms of the crossover?
Joshua Prince: There’s huge crossover. At the lower levels of recruitment where you’re doing permanent recruitment is very similar to doing sales of Real estate and temporary recruitment is very similar skills needed to do lettings or rentals in real estate, but obviously from a business perspective, the other elements of running a business are the same operations, marketing, technology and infrastructure.
human resources all the legalities, it’s very similar. So there’s a lot of crossover. When I worked in recruitment, I moved away from doing the day to day sales into an operational role. Where I was acquiring office space to set up new regional offices. I was looking to acquire other businesses.
So we’re working in M& A and that’s very similar to what we’re doing now, where we are trying to source. Land and buildings, whether we’re approaching the owners direct or we’re talking via brokers the skills, the process is very similar. Whether we’re, assessing a business to acquire for its profitability and how viable that might be is the same process almost as assessing a piece of land or a real estate asset.
To see how viable again it is for us to to acquire it.
Ketan Gajjar: Sure. And then, we were talking about the time it takes to acquire a land. And then you’ll let’s talk about that, the timeline, what are you looking at? Is it fast paced, very slow, mid slow?
Joshua Prince: It’s very slow. I would say it’s very similar to doing a, like a contingent search for permanent recruitment.
I’ll try and link things back to recruitment for your audience. So we have a search criteria. We’re not looking for a client. Typically, we’re looking for ourselves, although we do work with operator and investor clients, we go and undertake a search. And that takes time. And even if we go and find a potential asset today, which would be the same as a potential candidate.
It might take us many months of trying to call the landowner, the agent waiting for the right time to be able to prepare an offer and undertake our due diligence to be able to put our proposal forwards that could take. Months. Often we might not be the highest bidder. It will be on, it will be off. It will go hot and cold until eventually we hope to get a proposal accepted.
And then we go to the next stage of due diligence, which would be like going through, an interview round process. And then we’ve still got to satisfy all the rest of the due diligence, make sure we can get the funding. So has the funding been approved? For the role or for us for the acquisition.
And then we’ve got to go and apply for perhaps planning permission or anything else that we’d have to go through another process on. So typically for us, the acquisition process could take anything from three to five years. 12 months and potentially longer. And if we need to go for planning consent, I suppose this is where it’s slightly different for recruitment.
Once you’ve placed the person they’re in for us, if we need to go for planning consent, that could take between 18 to 36 months or longer. depending on the complexities of the asset. The challenge we face here is existing asset land owners. They’re not aware typically of the complexities. They think it’s a very simple and quick process.
So we have to go through an educational process with them to try and show them why it’s taking such a long time, because ideally we want to try and buy our assets subject to getting. That planning permission in place to be sure.
Ketan Gajjar: Sure. Sure. And then, when it comes to the roles and responsibilities, in this entire process, what kind of individuals and professionals are involved from state to state perspective?
Joshua Prince: It ends up being quite a large. team of professionals that can be involved, anything from agents and brokers that are sourcing the [00:07:00] opportunities. Then we’ll have architects and planning consultants that are reviewing them. And then there’s more technical consultants that would come on for specific elements, for example, transport, ecology, noise, acoustics.
Could be a structural engineer getting involved in the ground investigations, you might have to do different types of surveys that might focus on specific animals, birds, bats, badgers, for example, or a whole huge array of surveys and support is needed. So you end up having a very large professional team.
And that’s. I’m focused more so on getting planning. Once you then move on to the development side and the execution of the planning, there’s another huge team again that gets involved of, construction consultants, contractors all different, a whole host of different people. And that’s not including anyone [00:08:00] that might be supporting the finance or the legal side.
It’s not unusual for one project to have a team of 10 to 20 different consultants, possibly more.
Ketan Gajjar: And then working on a specific project or are they working for, multiple projects at one point in time?
Joshua Prince: Yeah. Often they would be working on multiple projects at the same time.
And there might be, if it’s a very large project, a single project manager where that is their sole role is on that project. But we’re managing a variety of projects that Some are short term, some are longer term so we’ve probably got at least a, a dozen or so projects on at any one time at different stages.
Ketan Gajjar: And has technology changed impacted the timelines, compared to a neck and back and now? Coming to the PropTech.
Joshua Prince: Yeah. Sorry, go on. Finish that sentence. Yeah. So
Ketan Gajjar: yeah, that was the question, sorry.
Joshua Prince: So yes, [00:09:00] every stage of the process has potentially got some kind of technical, technological application available that would help improve that part of the process.
And we recently went through an exercise where we mapped out our entire business process through the different stages of sourcing. analyzing, negotiating, due diligence, managing the projects, et cetera, et cetera. And I say that there’s a tool out there for helping you source opportunities. There’s another one out there for appraising the opportunities and assessing its viability.
There’ll be another tool out there for liaising with the project team. You might need to go and raise finance. There’ll be another tool out there that help you fill out all the bits and pieces and it will go out and help you arrange finance in a very efficient way. And some [00:10:00] tools we’ve adopted into our business, other areas or functions, we’ve kept it quite traditional.
But there’s a huge variety of products out there. And I’m only talking about products for. Planning and development, real estate as a whole has so many different segments from, commercial valuations to rentals estate agency sales commercial versus residential, corporate versus consumer and every element of every part of the market will have a technical offering, some kind of software that you could attribute to it, to help you improve it, to make it faster, to make it more efficient.
And it’s fascinating to see the amount of options that are available on the market.
Ketan Gajjar: Certainly. And then, you mentioned about [00:11:00] the timelines. So do you see, PropTech changing those timelines, from three months to 12 months and beyond? And do you see, obviously those timelines coming down in the following years to come?
Joshua Prince: I don’t think that PropTech is going to help in reduce the timelines that are involved in acquiring land specifically or taking it through planning consent. Or even delivering that consented scheme out. I can’t see PropTech helping massively in the short term. I think where it helps is in its efficiencies.
So it becomes much quicker to analyze an opportunity. It becomes much quicker to liaise with your team. The challenges is the process itself of submitting documents to the local authorities and are waiting for approvals.
You might be able to produce those documents slightly quicker. And we are [00:12:00] involved with a very clever firm who produce breadbook valuations using technology. So they produce commercial valuations in a fraction of the time it would normally take for somebody to do it in a traditional sense.
Instead of taking a whole day, it might take just a couple of hours. Now, it still is going to take. to produce it, send it off, wait for, the approval from the client, get it back. So in that respect, it’s still going to take the same amount of time day to day. However, the actual production of the work is a fraction of the time.
And I think that’s where we see it. So we can assess an opportunity to know if it’s good or bad, if it’s good or bad. Very quickly within a day, perhaps, whereas previously would have taken weeks to do the same amount of work. So there is a time saving there, [00:13:00] but it’s from weeks to days, rather than from years to months.
So it’s mainly driving
Ketan Gajjar: the efficiencies, selling time but post that, the timeline won’t change, when it comes to the local authorities. That timeline is going to be, as, static as possible right now, but you can work on more deals given the time savings, in the production.
Joshua Prince: Correct. We can cast a wider net. We can have a much larger potential pipeline of opportunities, and we’re able to manage so much more in the same amount of time because of the tools and software that is out there.
Ketan Gajjar: Sure. So let’s talk about you mentioned about, a team of 10 to 20 on a respective project.
So when it comes to recruiting, those professionals, how easy and difficult it is, especially from, with your background in recruiting and real estate, knowing, obviously the challenges involved in the entire process.
Joshua Prince: So [00:14:00] typically for us, the team that are involved are, they’re all, it’s all outsourced.
So we might have a project manager in house, but the architect, the planning consultant, the various other consultants, they’re all independent service providers. So the recruitment of them is different. Compared to internal recruitment, if we were bringing somebody in house, ultimately, we’re looking at track record.
We will run a mini tender process. We’re looking at cost. We’re looking at their capacity. We might be looking at their relationships and experience in that specific location or in that specific time period. With that specific type of project or it might just be someone that we’ve worked with before and we want to work with again.
So it’s a variety of things, but the recruitment processes. For the projects we work on is quite simple. We wouldn’t, we don’t use any technology for that, [00:15:00] for example, at the moment,
Ketan Gajjar: anyway. When it comes to the synergies, between both the markets, both the industries you’ve worked in, what insights would you share given your experience in both the sectors?
Joshua Prince: I think the common ground with both the sectors and with, business in general, especially in today’s economic environment is cashflow. So, doing consultancy or having some kind of management related income, when I say management property, regular income that comes in and you’re being paid in the way you would for temporary or contract recruitment, you’re getting paid regularly.
You’re getting perhaps a S a smaller margin. But over a continuous period of time, I think that is key. Where it becomes difficult is when you’re solely focused on larger contingent, say permanent recruitment or [00:16:00] larger sales where you’re not getting regular cash flow. And that can put increased pressure on a business.
I’m trying to keep this clear and I’m just thinking, permanent versus temporary recruitment where you’re selling. We, all your income relies on a sale versus income from rentals or some kind of consultancy type fee. And I think it’s about having that balance.
The other synergies are where you can look at. Other businesses or other service lines to bring in, whether it be through M& A type activities or just launching a new equivalent of a new desk and new. So for us, that might be we’re going to we’re already looking at residential development sites. Perhaps we’ll look at.
care home development sites or hotel development sites would be the same as a, I worked in medical recruitment, nursing [00:17:00] versus doctors versus radiography, you can add in new service lines, but, um, overall most businesses have a very similar structure and they just use different terminology.
Ketan Gajjar: So diversification is paramount, making sure that you’ve got your drip feed coming through, while you’re focusing on the bigger picture as well.
Joshua Prince: Certainly. And I’m sure it’d be the same for you in your business, when you’re looking for new clients and having a variety of, servicing a variety of sectors to give you a little bit more should one sector fall away.
And that’s what we found particularly over the last year or so with the economy in the UK. There’s been huge swings where sectors that were very strong have fallen away, particularly with COVID as well. If we take the office sector office rentals, office [00:18:00] investments are people going to be going back in the office?
There’s very mixed commentary in the news at the moment. Some businesses are forcing people to go back, but it’s unlikely to be five days a week. Is it an area that people should invest in? Should, banks lend into that space? Are people going to be taking leases versus wanting flexible contracts?
There’s so many factors that come into play that if you’re an investor and you’ve got exposure to offices, you want to diversify. And you want to, move into perhaps residential and it will be exactly the same, I’m sure, in recruitment, that if you are solely focused on oil and gas, you might want to move into another complementary sector, whatever that would be, maybe solar energy.
I don’t know. But you understand what I mean?
Ketan Gajjar: Yeah, you want to make sure that you hedge [00:19:00] your risk and diversify. Rather than putting, all your eggs in the, in one basket.
Joshua Prince: Yes, exactly.
Ketan Gajjar: So what would you suggest now, especially for recruiters who are trying to sell into real estate?
What are your thoughts on that?
Joshua Prince: It’s a funny time in real estate. I think there are a lot of businesses that are still recruiting. I do monitor just the market in general to see who’s recruiting, what kind of roles there are. Because I’m interested to understand the flexibility and the perks that are being offered these days.
So there’s definitely firms out there that are recruiting, but I think there are a lot of firms out there that are really struggling. We’ve seen a lot of particularly larger construction companies. fold recently, and I’m sure that there’ll be more businesses to that, that will go under over the next six, 12 months, especially [00:20:00] those that have got a lot of finance behind them and can’t, manage those those liabilities.
But at the same time,
