Prometheus Real Estate Group

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1) Prometheus aims at revolutionizing the apartment industry and has over 500 employees working towards achieving this vision. The responsibility of the employees includes managing leasing of apartments, meeting with the neighbors, completing service requests, monitoring financials among others. Therefore, it is important for Prometheus to on board leaders and achievers. People who are motivated, who challenge conventions and keep advancing.

To maintain a successful flat structure in an organization, it is highly important that employees maintain open and effective communication amongst peers, management and subordinates. With managers going on leave and substitute employees coming to fill in, there is often a lapse in communication leading to confusion, inefficiency and disconnect in the way the organization works. Adrianne, Assistant Neighborhood Director, was kind enough to share her thoughts on this. Over a coffee conversation, she shared some insights on her problems. She told us that the Santa Clara leasing office (Newhall Street) was not her regular office. She was merely filling in for the local Neighborhood Director and that was her 3rd day in the office. Before getting here, she didn’t have any prior communication / Knowledge Transfer with the Director that was going to be on leave. To add to that she mentioned about how an enraged neighbor came to asking for $500 he was entitled to, as the referral bonus for introducing a new tenant. But Adriaane had no idea about this and she was confused and lost. It is likely that the resident will not refer anyone in future. These kind of incidences hampers the organization’s reputation.

Adrianna shares that the most common communication gap is also the one that can occur at any stage in the process - unknown status updates. With so much back and forth, relying on emails and phone calls makes it difficult for real estate professionals and consumers alike to identify exactly where the process stands at a given time. Action items and documents can easily go missing or be completed improperly, leaving people to wonder who is responsible for the next step. They often ask themselves, “What am I expected to do next? And when?”

Many offices tend to hire full-time transaction coordinators as an attempt to manage this issue. It is a costly solution that still does not provide everyone with constant updates and true visibility into the status of the transaction.

The major communication problems that we observed in the Organization are:

· All employees are not being informed

· Employees don’t receive timely and consistent information from management

· The important and necessary information is not send to the concerned employee

· The employees are not open with each other

· The communication is being hampered due to different office locations

Communication is at the center of real estate market. So, it is advisable for the companies to take steps to address such problems. According to Drucker, the five functions of management – planning, organizing, staffing, leading and controlling – are all dependent on communication. In business, a lack of workplace communication is sometimes inexplicable yet most always detrimental. People are hired for jobs that they are knowledgeable and have skills about. But if they can’t interact with those around them in a productive manner – then not much benefit is really achieved. Whenever we speak to someone, there is always the risk of not being able to get our point across without sending our message through a number of filters, like personal biases, different mediums, etc. So, all this together leads to :

“What we have here is failure to communicate” - Cool Hand Luke, 1967

Communication failure is one of the top reasons for poor organizational culture, inefficiency, decreased engagement and reduced customer satisfaction. A lack of communication can lead to decreased innovation and negatively impact the bottom line.

Another problem that is being faced by the organization is to lease over 18,000 apartments that it owns. Leasing out such a large number of apartments, every year is a huge task, that’s why the business model followed by the organization is to lease out properties for long-term. Even after doing this, there are some properties that go un-leased. This has nothing to do with the condition of the property, the price, the amenities and the paying capacity of the people. All the properties are in good condition, the organization has spent more than $200 million in just renovations since 2007. As far as location is concerned, most of the properties are in Bay Area where paying capacity of the people is comparatively more and the price is also competitive. The organization understands the value that a resident brings and there is referral bonus also that is provided to the residents for every apartment leased by the referral. After looking closely, our team figured out that the main reason for this problem is the lack of extrinsic motivation among the employees/sales team. The employees feel that they are being under-rewarded for each apartment leased in comparison to what residents are getting. It took us a couple of visits before we can get the employees to open up and discuss the problems that they were facing. When we asked Andrew, a leasing agent working with the organization for the last 5 years, that what are problems faced by him, he informed that even though he is working as a leasing agent, he has been given the additional responsibility of being the property manager also. He is happy to take on the additional responsibilities because he is intrinsically motivated to help and resolve the problems of the residents/neighbor but this additional work of paperwork affects his performance in getting the apartments leased achieving common goal.

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