A Real Estate Business World.

Per the latest news, the industry as a whole is under-achieving. A report confirmed that the industry did have some centres of excellence, but that overall there were many problems to resolve.

These included In Real Estate Business World:

• insufficient research and development
• inadequate employee training
• low profitability, which in turn led to
• low levels of capital investment
• outdated methods of production
• excessive waste of resources e.g. time and materials
• many dissatisfied customers

Firms were criticised for being insufficiently aware of the business environment in which they operated, and for failing to adapt products and their processes to meet changing customer needs. It is also being said that too many firms in the industry were poorly led and lacked vision. The directors of a leading provider of modular buildings welcomed these findings. Clearly, its comments were accurate in relation to large sections of the construction industry.

As discussed previously, Today, most famous social media platforms allow businesses to run ads that attract specific groups of users based on what information they include in their profiles. Traditionally, the goal in media planning was to minimize wasted advertising, which was achieved by reducing the quantity of advertising sent to consumers who are unlikely to purchase or have an interest in their product and who are not active in the category. This gave birth to the idea of target advertising. As discussed in my blog Social Media and Happy Customer, this concept has proven to be a very effective way to reach out to the right customers through social media.

On the other hand, for large and successful firms, there is a good reason to believe that they are one of the industry’s centres of excellence and that their own progressive approach gave them a competitive advantage over many of their would-be rivals. The operations of larger firms that were studied, exhibited the kind of good practice that the construction industry wants to adopt. In particular, being customer-led and responsive to the changing business environment was seen to be the key to their success.

Changes take many forms and create new challenges. For an industry as a whole, it may well be that customers’ needs and requirements change. They look for new, better and cheaper products. The business environment in which firms operate lies outside themselves. It is their external environment, which is always changing. Some changes are so dramatic that everybody notices them, but others may creep up on an industry over the years and be largely ignored for too long.

The strategy of enhancing your company’s image helps decide how different stakeholders perceive your company. Your company is a brand, even if it is a small brand. Just like any other brand cannot control how it is perceived by others, you also can only use ways to enhance the image of your company and influence people to form a positive image of it. In my post Quick Tips for Business Development, I have discussed a few ways to enhance the image of your company. For e.g. there should be consistency in the communication theme that governs all aspects of your brand. Whether online or offline your brand must reflect integration. To ensure that your company is presented with one cohesive, unified and professional image, creating and implementing ideas in compliance with your brand guidelines can be helpful.

• Employees’ skills need revising to take advantage of new technologies
• New technologies become established. These encourage new firms to enter the industry with better products and cheaper ways of doing things. If this sounds interesting, contact HyperEffects, for a free consultation on the concept, now.
• New laws are passed that require changes in how businesses operate e.g. introduction of a minimum wage, restrictions in working hours and tougher health and safety requirements
• Traditional sources of supplies of raw materials and components begin to look less reliable
• New supply sources emerge
• Banks and other investors start to lose interest in financing the industry
• Pressure groups start to take a greater interest in the industry’s activities
• The industry ceases to be able to attract new, high calibre recruits

For individual firms within an industry, the external business environment also includes their competitors, who may introduce new, superior methods of production, change the ways in which they compete for business, extend their target markets and find new ways of attracting key employees.