Property management – in a man’s world

A man’s world. With the second anniversary of MIH having just gone by, we find it amazing when we consider the growth of the portfolio, the company and the staff but perhaps what is most interesting is that the company is staffed entirely by women.

Our founder when she first started the company belonged to a female business group and it was there that she met her marketing manager Helen Cox. When Helen first broached the idea of writing this blog, (and yes we do write our blogs), we did feel slightly concerned.

For one thing we definitely did not want to come of as a pioneering voice for female empowerment movement or for that matter as a company that does not have an equal opportunities policy. The first we are definitely not on the basis that we very much consider that our gender shouldn’t mean that we are subject to any limitations (although we have had conversations where we have been asked to be put through to a man as a woman couldn’t deal with the queries needless to say that the call concluded with the gentleman’s queries being satisfied and years later when we met him in the flesh we had a good chuckle over this- he is 105 years old so maybe understandable.) And the second is also not true we simply hadn’t interviewed any male candidates that we deemed suitable for the company.

At MIH we are very much about ensuring that all MIHers are team players, particularly as we work so closely together to ensure that we get the job done so our interviews play out a little differently. We don’t simply interview the candidate; we want them to interview us as we don’t feel that we can get the best out of a staff member unless they want to be at MIH.

At present this it has meant that we have ended up with an all-female team but have not found that this has been any real impediment to our management services. For us, we are primarily Property Managers which means that our role is to manage our client’s property, be it a single flat, an office, a shop, a small block of flats, a large block of flats or even a multi-use building to the best of our ability. For each property we prepare a clear plan for the future which is split between short, medium and long term management goals and set out about achieving each with the tools available to us. Gender in this case doesn’t really come into it.

We will however admit that we do find one failing with being an all-female team and at this point of writing we are cringing as we are sure Helen wouldn’t agree with this, and that is the difficulty of not being as tall as a gentleman.

This is particularly a problem when changing lightbulbs in our office due to the 11 foot ceilings. All we can say is Thank God for Long Ladders and it doesn’t hurt to remind our staff about Ladder safety and the need for a Ladder register too. Health and Safety is always at the forefront of our minds at MIH.

While we espouse that we can do everything at MIH we must admit that we were a bit taken aback when a potential client recently mentioned that we did not seem to have a very diverse team however we were very pleased to be able to explain why.

We were also pleased to be able to advise him that notwithstanding the above, our first gentleman would be starting with us at the end of May. What we didn’t mention was that we have another one starting shortly after and therefore it seems that we are no longer going to be outnumbering the men in Property Management or MIH for much longer.

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