House Flipping: 7 Ways Your HR Practices Can Impact Your Brand

As a house flipping entrepreneur or CEO, your hiring practices have a lot of impact on your brand. How are yours impacting the trajectory and potential of your real estate business and investments?

Do not underestimate the influence your HR practices have on your business and investments. Whether you are house flipping part-time as a solo investor, or are a full-time CEO, you are going to have a team. Everything you do impacts your brand and that trickles down to all areas of your business. Recognize this, and put the needed thought into how you hire, and elevate your success.

1. Pay Rates

How much you pay definitely affects your brand image. If potential hires can see the average of what you have paid others, they will assume your offer for them will be similar. That can be quirky if you have only hired $5 an hour offshore virtual assistants in the past, and are now ready to hire a top notch $75,000 a year developer. You may want to elaborate on what you offer in your job postings for clarity on this. Pay rates also reflect how customers, investors, lenders, and potential hires see your company. For example; if you are paying less than minimum wage for key functions which may impact quality of service and product, some could take that as a red flag. It may leave them wondering what legal issues, customer satisfaction, and product problems are bubbling under the surface.

2. Reviews You Leave

It is important to cultivate good reviews and to exit relationships well. Employees are increasingly using sites like GlassDoor to rate companies. However, it is equally important to watch the feedback you leave for others. That may include vendors, employees, and third party contractors. Would you want to work for, or with a firm that leaves nothing but poor reviews for others? That suggests there may be no way to please them, and working with them would be risking your reputation. Do leave honest reviews. Yet, consider how they reflect on you as well.

3. Job Ads & Hiring Processes

How job postings are worded, and the hoops involved in the hiring process will affect whether the best talent will want to work with your house flipping business or not. Some have been led to believe that they need to make this hard and stringent to scare away mediocre hires. Yet, be wary of scaring away the best talent too. If you wanted to hire Warren Buffett as a consultant, a top NYC PR person, or a technology expert from Google, do you think they will jump through hoops for a chance to work with you? Or do you need to make the process easy, fast, and attractive to busy and in-demand experts who may have a dozen larger offers from your competitors?

4. Hiring Transparency

Some companies try to mask who they are in their recruiting processes, and stay anonymous. That may have some benefit if you don’t want applicants asking for too much money based on your brand’s success, or if you are hiring to replace someone and don’t want to scare them yet. However, as recruiting has increasingly become virtual and global, great workers have been the victim of many scams. Today they simply cannot gamble their reputation and finances on unknown firms that they can’t lookup. If you have a good house flipping brand, and a visible leader with a good reputation, let that be known. You might find more top quality candidates will be fighting to work with you. And may even bid less, for the chance to affiliate with your company.

5. Perks, Bonuses & Benefits

These items, and how they are structured say a lot about how much you care about your team, and how serious you are about keeping long term team players. In some cases neat benefits can be more valuable than salary, and may empower smaller companies and newer startups to secure great talent. However, do pay attention to the message it sends, and the type of candidates it may attract. Do you just want someone who is seeking a comfortable position and will just show up and keep the job to enjoy the benefits? Or do you want a top performer who just wants an opportunity which will let them reach their full potential, and they are happy and confident in paying for their own perks and benefits?

6. Flex Hours & Remote Working

Some companies have enjoyed a lot of free press and attention thanks to their liberal vacation, flex time, and work from home policies. Others have seen their brands trashed in the news for antiquated policies. Do continue to hire in the way that works best, regardless of HR fads. Though do recognize how your approach can reflect how savvy you are about productivity and staff retention. You want the best ROI on your labor dollars, and you want your individual team members to be able to perform at their best. For some that may mean flexible schedules, remote working opportunities, and even being proactive about sending them off on vacation. For others, it may be an in-house or more structured position.

7. Type of People You Hire

The type of people you hire are seen online, on social media, in the news, on the local roads, in the lines at the grocery store, and in the gym. Investors, customers, and future potential hires will soon see the type of people you have working for you. They will associate that with your values, the sustainability of brand, how much they can trust you, how much they like you, and will base their desire to be associated with your company on that. So be smart in who you hire.