Relocation Directors: The Bridge Thread of the Relocation Web
There was a beautiful spider web in my garden today. It made me think about the relocation and mobility industry, and how all parts are interconnected like a web.
If we picture each silk or strand of the web, they might represent each role including the corporation and all of the players in the supply chain. An individual strand is not strong on its own. It is the collective strength of the strands that make it work to support the transferee to create a successful experience. The key to the web’s strength is the bridge thread, the foundation for all of the other silks to come together.
It could be argued that the bridge thread in the relocation web is the Relocation Director of the real estate brokerage, who assigns and monitors the agent’s performance and coordinates the transaction logistics. They train the agent team and monitor performance metrics to ensure only the highest performing relocation agents are utilized for this important task. They leap into action if anything starts to go sideways in the transaction. They are the point person connecting the transferee, agent, and corporation/RMC.
Not only is real estate the most expensive component of a relocation, but the transferee’s home is also the most emotional element, one that directly impacts their financial well-being and their work productivity. Finding the right home and community helps the family settle and allows the transferee to shift their focus towards work. The real estate agent is typically the only in-person relationship the transferee has, other than the household goods team.
Given their role, the essential value of real estate professionals in the relocation process is sometimes underestimated. While we need the corporations to move people, and we need transferees who are willing to move, they couldn’t do it without Relocation Directors and agents who are “feet on the ground” serving the transferring family, along with the many other service providers including relocation management companies, household goods providers, and temporary housing teams among others.
These companies also represent the largest percentage of membership and the largest revenue component for trade associations serving the mobility industry, yet their interests and specific needs are often not met or even addressed. There is no question in my mind that Relocation Directors of real estate firms are often undervalued in the overall relocation process.
Real estate is a local business with many nuances in housing markets and trends. These professionals have been thoughtfully advising during the pandemic and had the agility to escalate the use of innovative technology and processes for safe real estate purchases and sales. Lately I have seen webinars, conferences and other educational platforms featuring mortgage or other peripheral experts who are not actively engaged in day-to-day real estate speaking on the state of real estate rather than inviting actual practitioners. In the mobility world, Relocation Directors are intimately involved in the details of each transfer and should be the “go-to” resources for expert knowledge on real estate. These individuals interact regularly with members of their respective real estate networks or their own company across the country and the globe, so they have a national/global perspective in addition to local knowledge. Organizations like the Relocation Director’s Council can provide such experts who have this broad expertise.
My advice to the Relocation Directors out there is that we must make a concerted effort to regularly groom younger professionals to be future spokespersons to continue and strengthen our industry voice. Perhaps we in the real estate industry haven’t done a great job of elevating our roles in Worldwide ERC and other HR organizations to the same degree as other types of service providers. If you look at the WERC Board over the last few years, real estate is never presented proportionately based on the percentage of members in the organization. We are sometimes asked to comment on our local markets, but in addition, the real estate insights we bring on national and global market trends is invaluable for corporate and relocation management company members of international organizations like WERC. These audiences would also benefit from more intra-industry strategic conversations and collaborations involving real estate providers, since economics and emotion are integral pieces of the transferred employee experience, and that directly impacts talent management in a hyper-competitive global business environment.
So, given that real estate is such a critical strand in the mobility web, strong real estate representatives should step up and demand a much more important role in the greater mobility world. It should be our collective mission to increase our visibility and take advantage of our deep knowledge and expertise.
Meanwhile, our real estate segment of relocation should continue to attract and mentor younger members of our industry in order to create a line of successors who can hold their own in national and global mobility associations and platforms on the critical topic of housing for transferees. It is essential that Relocation Directors have a higher-profile voice in the industry. Our strand in the mobility web is an essential one without which the web would disintegrate.
“When spider webs unite, they can tie down a lion.” ~ Ethiopian Proverb
