Article Three - Landlord Zone Feb 2010
Why Employ? The Internet has another way for the Property World.
The property sector has always been labour-intensive -surveyors, estate agents and inventory clerks all need to physically visit houses and business premises in order to conduct their business. But now there is a way to cut back or even eliminate employment issues all together - by outsourcing. It is quite practical to use other companies to answer the phones, make sales calls, send out invoices, chase unpaid bills and file tax returns. Indeed, this is nothing new and has been used by firms large and small for many years. However the internet has taken this to a whole new level, thanks to its ease of access and instant response times. A small business practice can, with a little online assistance, take on much larger companies and beat them in almost all areas.
Staffing has always been something of a headache for an employer. It is demanding of management time, takes up valuable space, can be pricey to replace and expensive to remove. The difficulty of finding an alternative can be compounded by a geographical restriction in the quality of potential candidates, added to which is the cost of recruitment company fees or advertising. A common area for successful outsourcing has typically been the secretary and typist. Digital recorders now enable work to be sent instantly to remote internet workers, where before tapes could take days through the post. The benefits of sending dictation out of the office are clear - the freeing up of staff or space- less obvious are the advantages of improvement in quality, turnaround times and cashflow during quiet periods. Online outsourcing of typing has been around for at least 8 years since the rollout of Broadband in the UK. Various companies have sprung up to meet demand for this, one such being OutSec (www.outsec.co.uk) , a UK-based company with a long history in the property sector. OutSec supplements or replaces existing in-house typing facilities for estate agents, surveyors and many within the inventory market, from sole practioners to large multi-nationals. OutSec Operations Director Richard Phillips makes the observation that "Whereas 3 years ago, outsourcing was an alternative and slightly off-the-wall option for companies and individuals, it has become recently, and as a result of the economic downtown, a mainstream business choice. We are finding that more and more people in the property sector are seeing the value of using a flexible off-site British typing resource that matches the ebbs and flows of their own businesses". With so many companies in the property sector now opting to use off-site resources for basic in-house operations, the question to ask yourself is no longer "Should I outsource?" but "Can I afford not to outsource?".