Pros
The training here was good. I joined straight from University and I am now a very competent Real Estate agent.
Cons
There is a lot to go through. To start off with the salary here is absolutely criminal and in my opinion feels like a loophole used to pay less than the living wage, which baffles me how it is legal. The pay is £14k per year. They will guarantee that you receive the equivalent of £28k in your pay check but you then owe them £14k back out of your commission so you end up working a commission based job but not earning a big chunk of the commission for the work you put in. Keep in mind this is definitely not industry standard. Your commission should be yours as you have earned it, there is no excuse to pay less than living wage on the salary. You could likely work in bar or retail in London and earn more than this. The culture in the office is very negative as well. You are set with targets that are also much higher than industry standard and make it easy to burn out which inevitably resulted in an extremely high turnover in my branch. Furthermore whenever you don't hit target I was spoken down to and berated which was very counterproductive and lowered morale even more. You will work every other Saturday which to be honest I didn't mind during the first 3 months as you receive a day in lieu however once you get your own desk after probation this is removed and you simply work 6 days a week every other week with no additional compensation or holidays which when coupled with the fact that your hours are 8.30am-7pm on weekdays and 9am-5am on a Saturday makes a work-life balance feel impossible. You are told on the induction day that you aren't allowed to have a Linkedin account, which I found very strange. This, I imagine is because they are conscious of how poorly they are treating their employees who will obviously leave after receiving multiple headhunts from recruiters offering much better roles and they would rather their employees not realise their worth rather than pay them or treat them better. When I handed my notice in after finding a much better role in the same industry a dexters was extremely patronising, telling me I was making the biggest mistake and made it out as if I would come crawling back, going as far to google my new employer in front of me and essentially bully me for moving to a company they didn't deem as high calibre as themselves. This continued for the entire month that I worked off my notice. When I did finally leave they refused to pay me the thousands of commission I had earned from sales and actually only paid me based on a £14k yearly salary which worked out at just over £1000 for a month of work, keeping in mind that when divided by the hours I worked, roughly equals £5.50 per hour. I think this is incredibly poor due to the fact I can imagine a lot of people who are living in London pay check to pay check who would feel trapped in this role as they physically wouldn't be able to pay the bills for a month off this and would be in a very uncomfortable financial position when trying to leave. On the bright side you get to have Fun Fridays! where you play monopoly go for 30mins and have a pastry so I suppose that probably makes up for it? I would avoid at all costs and I now feel much happier having left for a role at a much better real estate company however the bar is set so low that you could likely go to any company and be better off.
