Four Work-From-Home Strategies To Embrace For Your Real Estate Business
Jarred Kessler is the CEO of EasyKnock.
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If you ask me, working from home is amazing. You can wear pajamas from the waist down, you have no commute and you can even sleep in. I understand that the process of reading on a train or after-work drinks with your co-workers has been lost, but there has also been much to gain. Pre-pandemic, the real estate industry was lagging in remote work opportunities, but we’ve shown we’re as adaptable as any industry out there. The fast-paced nature and culture of the real estate industry do present some unique challenges, though. Here is some of my best advice to keep your real estate business humming, even while you’re working from home.
Create A Designated Workspace
Your garage (or as we call it in my house, Le Garage) is not only a Covid-safe area, it’s also an often underused area that's perfect for a home office. As you work you can have fresh air coming in through the open doors, or you can purchase a moderately priced plug-and-play heating or cooling unit if you need a more temperate climate. In your detached workspace, take advantage of whatever direct light you can access. Regulated sunlight may reduce headaches, stress and drowsiness in workers, and possibly even increase worker satisfaction and combat anxiety. Adding a rug or carpet and inexpensive personal touches like proper work lighting can make it feel more like a room than a garage. If you don't have a garage, you might be able to construct a shed that is not connected to your house for the same use.
Creating a structure or space that can hold guests or have an office set up, all while maintaining space between your main house, can be a huge bonus. This could be cheaper than you think and, as a bonus, add more resale value than you might expect.
Don’t Think You Have To Sacrifice A Traditional Morning Meeting
Whether you’re in a more traditional real estate brokerage or a real estate tech startup, a lot of companies in this industry opt for a morning meeting to get everyone off on the right foot and up to date. The industry moves fast, after all. With the pandemic, it’s not as simple as throwing down a dozen donuts to draw a crowd into the conference room. But that doesn’t mean you should give up the morning meeting if you feel it’s important for your business.
Set a virtual meeting, but make sure that you keep it short and sweet by sticking to a simple meeting outline. Zoom fatigue is real, and you can help combat it in your staff by sticking to the essentials. You might also consider incentivizing morning meeting attendance and/or participation. For instance, budget to have a delivery service send some donuts and coffee for each staff member who showed up and made a contribution at every meeting over the course of a week.
Take Advantage Of Industry-Geared Virtual Networking Events
Conventions almost seem like a weird fever dream at this point. Did we really travel cross-country to conventions, stay in overcrowded hotels and sit in rooms packed with people to get the latest dish on the industry? Oh, yes, we did. Now, many of the same outcomes can be achieved through virtual networking events. We can get together online via video conference, chats or even virtual reality events and learn a lot of the same things and meet a lot of the same people.
At EasyKnock, we’ve even set up virtual events for our staff that aren’t necessarily work-related. For instance, we moved our holiday party to a virtual platform. It allowed us all to get together, celebrate and communicate so that we could connect and team build. Other team-building events go over great in a virtual environment, like office game night or virtual happy hour.
Remember That Work And Life Are Separate
In the real estate business, it’s hard enough to manage some semblance of work-life balance, but this has been especially true during the pandemic. It’s so easy to just go do one more little thing when your desk is just across the house that you’ve been in almost 24/7 for a year or better. That’ll wear you down, though. No one can be “on” all the time. It’s important that your staff knows that, too, and that your company culture enforces the idea that downtime is a good thing and not something that’s going to set them back.
Set working hours and stick to them. When it comes to client contacts, it can be even harder to set aside work until the following day, but laying out your working hours ahead of time so that clients know when it’s appropriate to call and when it’s not can help. At the very least, make sure that you put it all away on occasion. Shut the door to your office and pretend it’s not there on the weekend so that you can spend time with your family and friends. We are in a new world and it can be exciting.
If you have the ability to upgrade your home and workspace and want to, this is a great time. If you are a little more challenged right now, there are small ways to make changes. At the end of the day, if it’s warm enough, there is nothing better than working in your backyard — all you need is a table, umbrella and Wi-Fi and you can connect with the whole office safely from your own home. The pandemic has forced us to adapt and change the way we handle business, and I think that it will change how we work from here on out, even when in-person interactions are safe again.
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How Working From Home Changed Our Kids’ Perceptions Of Work
(iStock)Years ago, a friend of mine, at the time a clothing designer for the snowboarding line of an athletic apparel company, was working from home. Her then 7-year-old-son saw her at her laptop, and asked what she was doing. She said she was working. “No, you’re not.” He was defiant. “You’re a professional snowboarder.” That is what he had understood her to be and, in an instant, a pretty cool profession became a disappointment.
Fast-forward to now, when the pandemic has forced many people to work from home. The concept of being in the same physical space among actual colleagues borders on anachronistic in 2021. For those with children, there’s been an additional adjustment. Before schools reopened in the Netherlands, where we live, my dining room table was littered with the school books and laptops of my three children, with my husband or me at the helm, trying to do our own work.
The pandemic changed everything about family life. These are the parts parents want to keep.It was disruptive, but it was also interesting to see the work my children are doing and to observe how they work.
At the same time, my children have been equally observing what my husband and I do during the day — which, as with my friend’s son years ago, has exposed some misconceptions. While they have always had some understanding of what my husband and I do for a living, our working life before covid was a fraction of how they experienced us. How has watching us work every day impacted how they perceive not only our careers, but careers in general?
The situation that can benefit everyone, says Kimberly A.S. Howard, associate professor of counseling psychology and applied human development at Boston University. Howard says by age 4, children can begin to form ideas about various occupations. “There’s the opportunity, when work is happening at home, for the work to be more obvious to children, and for parents and adult caregivers to have real conversations about their work,” Howard says via Zoom. “When parents say, ‘this is how I spend my day and this is why I do it, this is what motivates me, this is what benefits come from it,’ kids can apply these ideas to other careers.”
My children have seen me working from home since their birth, at different levels of cognition. When he was about 3, my son (now 10) came into my office while I was writing an article. I made an attempt to trigger his interest, but he seemed unmoved. “What is it you think my job is, actually?” I asked. “Your job is to point at squares,” he said. To type.
“Younger kids are very focused on the concrete,” Howard says. “What is observable. The physical act is touching the keyboard, but what is it that you’re providing? It’s not until later that they begin to understand what these concrete steps represent, and that can be facilitated by conversation. We can explain that.”
My husband works in logistics for a multinational company that manufactures contact lenses. Before the pandemic, our children saw him leave the house for work — “ in their minds, a place filled with a mysterious air of “otherness” in relation to his home life. It was a place where he had a large, tidy office with a jar of chocolates and a warehouse with robots, where he knew people we didn’t, and which we only visited when Santa Claus paid his annual respects.
Before covid, my children believed his father was a scientist who made contact lenses, together with robots. They now understand that their dad spends most of his days in calls with colleagues, talking about things like SKU numbers. They get that their dad is part of a long chain that makes it possible for peopleto get contact lenses, but that’s less interesting. Such revelations can be disillusioning for young children thinking about careers at a stage when, according to Howard, ideas of jobs are characterized by “fantasy and imagination.”
And excitement. A study published in 1995, “Occupational Portrayals on Television,” examines how television dramatizes and sensationalizes careers for children. “Medical professionals are shown in hospital settings (as opposed to outpatient settings)” the researchers write. “They treat pathology more than they engage in prevention […].” And violent crimes such as murder are very common for television police, “whereas most real-life crimes are nonviolent and related to property.”
Children have been getting more firsthand glimpses at the often-mundane reality of their parent’s jobs, such as Leo Vijendran, 15, whose father works in the Netherlands for the European Space Agency. Turns out, at-home space exploration isn’t as gripping as you might think. “I noticed that he was always in meetings,” Leo explains via email. “I knew my father was not an astronaut, but it still surprised me how little physics he used in his job. It isn’t what would come to mind, when one thinks of working on missions to space.”
Kai Levin, 16, of Vancouver, British Columbia, admires his dad’s job as a corporate video producer but admits it feels less “cool” lately. “Before, he got to travel all around the world and make videos,” Kai says via Messenger. “But now he is at the living room desk when I wake up. He’s still at his desk when I come home.” His sister, Lauren, 12, concurs that her dad’s job seems a little less glamorous lately. “He doesn’t go anywhere,” she says, also via Messenger. “He used to dress really sharp for the office, but now he just wears sweatpants and housecoats.”
It helps to remind children that working at home means many of us are working differently than we are accustomed, Howard says. Valentina Gultlingen, 14, who lives in the Netherlands, says after a year of doing schoolwork online, she definitely does not want a future job sitting in front of a computer. Her mother, a project manager, works from home. “I don’t know how she does it,” Valentina says. With online learning, she misses the academic and social benefits of bumping into other students between classes. “
More positively, the pandemic has given children exposure to a broader range of jobs than they may have had previously, Howard says. “It trains their eye to see that this is an interconnected world,” Howard says, “and to develop an appreciation for a wide range of occupations, not just those that have been historically associated with prestige. Everyone is functioning for a purpose and we need to recognize how important it is that all of these roles are being occupied.”
As for my children, they are still in the stage of discovering what they love to do, sometimes connecting those interests to potential careers. My youngest daughter (7) wants to be a farmer because she likes the outdoors and loves animals. My older daughter (9) is curious and determined, and is always teaching herself a skill — from knitting to acrobatics — but doesn’t want these things to be jobs; she just wants to be good at them.
My son wants to be a professional footballer, preferably for Manchester United. I’m encouraging him to strive for athletic excellence, but talking to him about other football-related jobs for non-players, such as becoming an athletic equipment engineer, a physical therapist, or to work as a sports journalist — you know, to type.
Tracy Brown Hamilton is an Irish/American journalist living in The Netherlands.
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Parents want to keep working from home post-pandemic
6 ways parents can deal with work-from-home interruptions
The pandemic has parents working harder than ever — and kids get to see it
Most Americans Want To Keep Working Remotely Or At Home As Part Of Work Schedule
After a year of lockdowns that left many working Americans working from home or remotely, a large proportion of the U.S. Workforce may not be eager to start working outside the home as restrictions ease across the country.
Twenty-six percent of Americans who are employed either full or part time say their ideal working situation would be to work outside the home. But that doesn't mean most want to work solely from home either: just 19% say this is their ideal work situation. Instead, the most popular option is to have some sort of combination, chosen by 41% of working Americans. Another 14% would simply rather not work at all.
The hybrid preference seems to be widespread, cutting across age groups, and it is the top choice of Americans who are employed both full and part time. There are some differences by gender: though both working men and women prefer a mix, men are twice as likely as women to prefer working outside the home, and by two-to-one, men would rather work fully outside the home than work fully from home or remotely. More women would rather work from inside the home or remotely all the time than only work outside of the home.
This poll was conducted by telephone April 13-18, 2021 among a random sample of 1,011 adults nationwide. Data collection was conducted on behalf of CBS News by SSRS of Glen Mills, PA. Phone numbers were dialed from samples of both standard landline and cell phones.
The poll employed a random digit dial methodology. For the landline sample, a respondent was randomly selected from all adults in the household. For the cell sample, interviews were conducted with the person who answered the phone.
Interviews were conducted in English and Spanish using live interviewers. The data have been weighted to reflect U.S. Census figures on demographic variables. The error due to sampling for results based on the entire sample could be plus or minus 3.5 percentage points. The error for the sample of Americans who work full or part time could be plus or minus 4.3 percentage points. The margin of error includes the effects of standard weighting procedures which enlarge sampling error slightly. This poll release conforms to the Standards of Disclosure of the National Council on Public Polls.
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