I was lucky enough to attend this year’s EG Future Leaders Summit, an event which explores new talent in the industry and gets you thinking about how the industry could be a better place.
So, in true form, I have been thinking. What if the issues we are grappling with now, didn’t exist? Maybe they’d have been resolved…or maybe we avoided them all together? Let us imagine a perfect world.
As John Lennon so eloquently put it, it’s easy if you try.
1 in 6 households live in social housing, so imagine these places being built to live, not just built to rent. Nationwide social mobility will be a given, not a goal, in turn benefiting education and employment prospects. Unlocking this whole new host of talent would bring more creative and diverse thinking into our businesses.
With more creative thinking in real estate, we would enable better workplaces and deliver flexible working options. It wouldn’t just mean the hours someone works in the office, but how people work best to provide the greatest value to our companies. With more options for working styles, the boxes we put people in to define them (or really confine them) would not be needed. In short, flexibility would be easy and assumed.
In my utopia, our industry would see a new generation of thinkers, topically Gen Z, as an opportunity for growth. The potential for innovative thinking and improved ways of working would be at the forefront of application processes, allowing anyone, from any background, to throw their hat in the real estate ring.
More talent, more options, more industry improvement.
These sorts of scenarios are not just a distant dream but, I believe, feasible. Yes, pragmatic approaches will be needed to usher the real estate industry into an era that realises the full benefits, but these approaches are not as farfetched as we may think.
You may say I'm a dreamer - but I'm not the only one.