Real estate is transforming and seeks hybrid professionals

Governance and partnership director, mixed use strategist, development manager, community builder, sustainability advisor, data analytics expert: these are some of the figures that the real estate market is looking for but struggling to find. The reasons add up: for junior profiles, universities do not offer orientation courses; for senior profiles, those coming from other worlds are unfamiliar with these roles that change perimeter from one company to another.

Yet the sector is at the centre of a structural transformation: urban redevelopment (no longer only in Milan and Rome, but also in smaller cities) opens the door to more hybrid skills than one imagines. Engineers, architects and economists, of course, but also jurists, sociologists, philosophers. Many professionals have a chance by coming from sectors outside real estate: from digital technologies (data scientist, data engineer) to hospitality. The latter hybridisation is increasingly strategic: "Real estate today does not sell square metres," observes Raoul Ravara, senior managing director of Hines Italy, "but builds places where people want to stay and the figures coming from hospitality have the ideal skills.

real estate concerns a wide range of professions: it includes developers, asset and property managers, technical and financial consultants, specialised managers. According to the Report on the real estate services supply chain in Europe and Italia by Scenari Immobiliari, in our country there are more than 1.7 million employees, distributed in more than 550 thousand companies. "To train skills, abroad there are already specialised courses," observes Simone Santi, development director of Near Sgr: for example, the School of Real Estate & Planning of the University of Reading and the Master in Cities of the London School of Economics. "In Italia, training remains, instead, very much linked to learning by doing". The role of the communities is strategic in this scenario: Rics Matrics, dedicated to young professionals and very dynamic in Italia, supports and orients even those who are still in their studies; Urban Land Institute is active in proposing moments of confrontation and in-depth analysis among professionals.

To create cohesion between supply and demand, in addition to training, a shared taxonomy needs to be built. "I studied construction engineering and entered the real estate business almost by chance,' says Giulia Genoni, senior valuer at Colliers and referent of the Matrics Committee. 'My first role was as a facility manager and there I realised that the coding of tasks changes from one company to another. Facility manager, property manager and asset manager all manage the real estate, but on different levels: the first deals with the technical and operational side; the second handles payments and agreements with tenants; the third oversees the properties in the fund portfolio. Then there is the fund manager, who governs the fund as a whole. In more mature markets, such as the US, the difference between the roles is clear. Here we still have a long way to go'.

In addition to management figures, roles related to strategic vision emerge. "Just as a curator is needed in a museum to determine the success of an exhibition," observes Santi, "so there are figures in our sector that are still underdeveloped in Italia, such as the governance and partnership director, i.e. the person who structures partnerships and acts as the glue between the various stakeholders; the mixed use strategist, who deals with the enhancement of the functional aspects of liveability and usability; or the development manager, the person who accompanies an operation from vision to bankability, acting as a bridge between the urban planning, design and commercial parts and ensuring that the vision remains that of the client'.