Abstract

Titel: The optimal salary system in the real estate industry

Authors: Emma Björkman och Terése Emanuelsson Widström

Tutor: Tommy Bergquist

Problems background: The challenges companies face is to recruit, retain and motivate empolyees to work in a way that promotes the company. Skilled staff are difficult to recruit, more difficult to maintain and expensive for companies to lose but undeniably the most important key to success. How should the optimal salary system be composed to attract operators in a competitive market such as real estate industry, with a predominance of commission based salary?

Purpose: To examine how the salary system is linked to motivation and goals in the real estate industry. Based on this we imagine, therefore, the question of what would be the optimal salary system in the real estate brokerage industry?

Theories: This essay processes the salary systems, commission based salaries, agent theory, goal and goal congruence.

Method: The essay is partly based on qualitative method in the form of open semi-structured interviews with six respondents including five franchises and a partner, and a quantitative method in the form of a questionnaire survey with 31 real estate brokers.

Results: Identifies five categories that are elementary to achieve the common goals of the company and result in which could be the optimal salary system. The categories are strategies for achieving the goals, goal congruence, monetary rewards, non- monetary rewards and the optimal salary system.

Anlysis: This analysis is linked to earlier research together with the results of our study. Through our procedure, we have shown how management and employees are working to achieve both individual and common goals. The emphasis has been to investigate what the optimal salary system would be among both employers and employees, which is lacked in previous studies.

Conclusion: The crucial findings of this essay indicates that the current salary system is perceived as motivating but to some degree stressful because of the uncertainty it entails. This is why the majority of our respondents desire a change of the current salary system. A combined salary system with a fixed and a commision-based part considered to be the optimum.

Keywords: Goals, motivation, commissions, real estate brokerage industry, optimal salary system