Recruiters report a strong recovery in hiring—and, in some cases, salaries and bonuses—across much of the marketplaces industry. But their opinions are mixed on whether the gains are universal. Meanwhile, the work-from-home trend and the arrival of COVID-19 variants loom as wildcards.

Millman Search Group vice president Chloe Rosenthal said the company is extremely busy and landing new clients every day from all over the country. “Because demand is so great, candidates can literally not only pick and choose the job they want but can also pick the salary that they want. Many companies are even turning to bonuses to attract and secure talent. For example, there are companies out there giving out bonuses of $50 to $100 just for filling out a job application and $500 to $1,000 just to stay with the company or employer for 90 days.” Other employers are giving bonuses to new hires merely for showing up at the physical office, store or restaurant on their agreed-upon first day of work, Rosenthal added.

Positions in greatest demand include property accountants, leasing experts and construction managers, Rosenthal said. Salary ranges for property accountants are running from $80,000 to $120,000 depending on their experience and geographic location, the recruiter said. The range for leasing experts, depending on the deal, is generally $100,000 to $175,000, plus bonus/commission arrangements that can total 20% to 50% of their salaries. Construction managers are earning anywhere from $110,000 to $185,000, based again on their geographic locations and experience levels, according to Rosenthal.

Bouncing back

For Poline Associates president David Poline, the turnaround in employer demand over the past few months has been head spinning. “I don’t exactly know how we got back here so quickly. I’ve expanded my team to accommodate the increased demand for candidates,” he said.

The recruiting business was hit hard at the onset of the pandemic. Back in February 2020, Poline was busy and optimistic as he attended ICSC’s OAC Summit in Nashville and networked with colleagues who were looking to fill positions. “Thirty days later, by the end of March 2020, every search I was working on had either been suspended or canceled,” Poline recalled. “It went from 30 jobs to zero jobs. To be quite honest, at that point, I thought it would be a long, long time before companies were going to need a search firm like ours.” Poline, a University of Pennsylvania Wharton School graduate who earned a law degree from Columbia University, even thought about restarting his law license. “For probably 60 to 90 days in the early spring of 2020, I was just not sure whether our specific niche was going to come back,” he said. “That’s how bad it was.”

In the end, though, Poline & Associates had a better-than-expected 2020, momentum that continued into early 2021. And by mid-May, the recovery was starting to take off thanks in part to the national vaccination campaign. “Employers started reaching back out and saying, ‘You know, we still have a need here. If you find the right person, we’re willing to move forward on the search we had started over a year ago.’”

Like Rosenthal, Poline said strong demand is now leading to bigger paychecks. “The wage pressures that have been seen in more hourly type jobs have now trickled up to salaried positions, and even some higher-salaried positions. Not only are companies paying for increases related to this moment in time, but it feels like they’re also catching up to probably where salaries should have been over the last five to 10 years as we emerged from the shadow of the Great Recession.”

Compensation packages can be 10 to 15 percent higher than what Poline & Associates was seeing at the end 2019, according to the recruiter. “Clients who are notoriously tough negotiators are paying significantly more than their advertised compensation range pretty much across the board.”

Poline gave two additional anecdotes to illustrate the strength of employer demand. From 2010 to 2020, only once did he see a candidate resign to take a job with one of his clients but then stay put after receiving a huge raise from the original employer. “In the last two months,” Poline said, “that has happened three times.” And after one real estate attorney agreed to work for one of Poline’s clients, one of the attorney’s own clients swooped in and offered to double her salary. “Of course, she took that offer.”

Differing effects

Both Rosenthal and Poline see a broad-based recovery driving up demand for candidates in markets outside the Southeast and the Mid-Atlantic. “There is tremendous demand for people throughout every region,” Rosenthal said, citing Labor Department data showing that 10.1 million jobs were open on the final day of June, compared with 9.2 million in May.

But CenterNet Search Group president Chris Rollbusch said that in retail real estate, the effects of the recovery can vary based on the type and size of the company. While CenterNet fills a variety of corporate-level and on-site positions like mall managers, operations directors and marketing directors, a large portion of the firm’s business comes from smaller developers as they try to turn around distressed or underperforming centers. “Unfortunately, this segment doesn’t seem to be experiencing the same rapid recovery that we hear repeated on Wall Street when looking at the phenomenal recent gains by the largest REITS in our industry,” Rollbusch said. The REITs had “successfully divested most of their underperforming assets prior to the pandemic.”

In Rollbusch’s view, geography matters, as well: After taking longer to recover from the initial COVID-19 wave, some California markets then were hit earlier by the delta variant. Stricter public health policies — San Francisco recently mandated proof of vaccination for certain indoor activities — also could be tamping down the recovery in parts of the U.S. West. Despite having many clients in the region, Rollbusch is optimistic about the trajectory of employer demand in the industry. “Many experienced people are still looking to move and improve their current situations,” he said. “Most developers seem to realize that they have major [employment] needs to be filled, but they still have a few obstacles to address first.”

New concerns

Just a couple of months ago, many eagerly looked forward to the post-pandemic economy. In California, the easing of mask mandates and resumption of normal life had triggered a strong sense of optimism, Rollbusch said. “Everyone was saying that retail is coming back, and we started getting phone calls along the lines of, ‘We need somebody to manage this particular project.’” But the rapid spread of the delta variant has prompted some developers to suspend such plans. “The message might be: ‘Let’s slow down a little bit. We can have somebody from another project cover that property.’”

The pandemic also has introduced a major question for employers, precisely what to say to employees who want to keep working from home. Already, employers in the marketplaces industry have been hiring candidates without ever meeting them in person. And increasingly, those candidates are demanding more flexibility around whether or how much they work in person at the office, Poline said. “It is all everybody is talking about. It is affecting existing employees, and then it has become a massive topic of conversation among those people who are being interviewed for new jobs.”

Candidates in some roles are more likely than others to receive flexibility from their employers. “Property managers already spend much of their time at their properties, so [work-from-home] may just be redefining what is required on the days when they are not physically on-site,” Poline noted. “The firms that show the most flexibility are the ones having the most success in hiring.”

But for companies with both retail and office interests, the work-from-home trend poses a dilemma. “The way in which they handle returning to the office for their employees can be seen as an example for their prospective tenants and even society at large,” Poline said. “Their perspective is, ‘If we’re not expecting our own employees to be in the office, then what message are we sending to our office tenants about the viability of office real estate?’ So you do see some real estate companies being a little bit careful and trying to balance their employees’ needs and desires with their own business interests.”