Workplace reviews and discussion: 全國不動產經紀股份有限公司

The colleagues are generally quite friendly, and the boss takes fairly good care of employees. There are also some stories about the chairman being very loyal and caring, as well as senior managers personally getting involved, which makes you feel that this is an environment with genuine human warmth.

Overall, the workplace is fairly comfortable, and the atmosphere is good. The workload is not heavy—in fact, you could say the standards are extremely low (some colleagues really don’t seem to understand what they are doing; according to a manager, the company has also hired quite a few people in the past who took a salary without contributing much). If you are simply looking for a job to make a living, this might be a good choice.

As the franchise headquarters of a real estate brokerage company, it is quite strange that almost none of the internal staff or managers have brokerage experience.

When I first joined the company, I was told that the company’s back-end system was very strong and that its future prospects were excellent. The company also emphasized that communication was smooth in a small company, and so on. In practice, however, my experience was completely different, as detailed below.

First, more than half of the franchise stores do not use the company system. Compared with competitors, it has no particularly outstanding advantages, and strange bugs appear from time to time. Because the usage rate is low, the degree of optimization is very limited. When a store owner raises an issue, unless it is an immediate error, there is a 99% chance it will not be fixed. Usually, they simply say that it will be added to the development schedule, and then no one knows how long it will take to be changed. After a while, no one wants to report problems anymore. The company’s senior managers also do not seem particularly eager to improve this area. However, according to the company, its back-end system is competitive among brands at the same price point, and the situation at other brands is even worse.

The company claims to have a young team and smooth communication, but as soon as you join, you discover that there are countless group chats. Every additional management layer or missing supervisor means another group chat. Someone will then ask in the group whether there are any problems, but basically no one raises anything; it is merely a formality. In reality, people are extremely traditional and concerned about what their supervisors think. For some reason, whenever you raise a problem, the other person’s first response seems to be that they think you are looking for trouble. After a while, you no longer know whether you should raise issues at all. Simply put, it is very bureaucratic, although it is also possible that I am personally difficult to get along with and have communication problems.

The company holds all kinds of meetings every week, but more than 70–80% of them feel like a waste of time. Every meeting also requires setting various KPIs, but when you ask supervisors where the KPI figures came from or what they mean, you often cannot get a proper answer. Sometimes the same figure even has different calculation methods. After attending a few meetings, however, you realize that you are simply expected to set them according to the logic used by those before you; asking too many questions only makes people feel that you are looking for trouble. In addition, the methods for improving KPIs are almost entirely formalistic plans without any real meaning, which makes the process feel extremely wasteful of time. Besides the long meetings, many colleagues spend a large portion of their time preparing for them, while the company believes that all these meetings are necessary and meaningful.

The company’s training basically seems to consist of direct supervisors teaching according to their own impressions—teaching whatever comes up, with no clear process. As a result, there are often things that no one has told you, yet everyone seems to think you should already know them, which is very uncomfortable. Moreover, as mentioned above, although the company is a brokerage headquarters, it often seems unclear about certain front-line business details that I believe the company should understand. This sense of contradiction is truly bizarre.

One of the company’s businesses is providing training to its branch offices. However, internally, there is basically no one who genuinely possesses comprehensive professional real estate knowledge and practical experience. Some documents concerning relevant regulations appear to be full of loopholes, and the course design therefore almost completely avoids practical matters. Based on my own work experience, I found the content too superficial; some parts were useful, but largely impractical. In addition, the company likes to exaggerate the statistics in its courses, often using sales pitches such as “increased performance several times over,” while giving no indication of where the data came from. It really resembles the superficial packaging tactics of a second-rate salesperson with little substance. Almost all of the useful training is provided by externally hired scriveners or lecturers, giving the company an overall impression of outsiders leading experts. The company, however, believes that the training it provides is excellent, that its internal staff have strong credentials, and that it is a leading force in the industry. This is something you, as someone considering joining the company, will have to judge for yourself.

The company’s operating condition does not appear good, but for some reason it is extremely confident and seems not to believe there is any problem. It claims to be continuously improving, but I could not feel this at all while employed there. After leaving, I observed the subsequent expansion of its branch network for a while, and it also seemed to be moving backward rather than forward (this judgment is based only on the number of stores listed on the official website, so there may have been an information gap). Given that the real estate market was doing very well at the time, I personally believe the company’s operations must have had major problems to produce this result. It is difficult to describe more details, and the company’s ideas differed greatly from mine. In the end, I simply could not stay any longer and chose to resign.

The above is only my personal experience from approximately two months of employment. I still recommend that anyone interested in this company learn more about the actual situation through an interview. At least, the people inside the company all appear to be quite satisfied with it, so it is also very possible that I simply was not a good fit for the company culture. I wish all job seekers success in finding employment.