By Kristjan Byfield.
Property people are good at keeping things moving. Deals progressing, tenancies turning over, problems solved... or at least quietly contained until they can be.
From the outside, it looks like a well-oiled machine.
But speak to anyone actually doing the job - managing a portfolio, handling maintenance, picking up the phone for the fifth time that day to calm a situation down - and you get a different picture. This is an industry held together by people. And that came through clearly in my recent Viking Chats conversation with David Mintz.
"Just another day"
That phrase gets used a lot in property. But what's actually sitting behind it?
A tenant in distress. A landlord under financial pressure. A deal hanging by a thread. A colleague carrying more than they should be.
And yet it carries on, because it has to. That's the nature of lettings and property management. It's immediate, reactive, and often unpredictable.
The problem is that over time, you start to normalise the pressure. The line between "busy" and "overloaded" gets blurry. You're expected to be responsive, professional, calm, and supportive, all at once, all the time. And most people manage it. But the cost of that rarely gets talked about.
David and I got into this on the podcast. There are a lot of people in this industry who are just... getting on with it. Without ever really pausing to ask whether it's actually sustainable.
Why this isn't just an internal problem
How teams feel shows up in the work. In the quality of service, the communication, the decisions being made, the experience clients have. When people are stretched, things slip — not through lack of care, often quite the opposite. But there's only so much anyone can hold.
One of the biggest culprits here is process inefficiency. Manual tasks, chasing information, duplicated work. None of it feels significant on its own, but it adds up, creates friction. And friction creates pressure that, honestly, a lot of people don't need to be carrying.
That raises a question worth sitting with: how much of what feels hard is actually avoidable?
What "doing things differently" actually looks like
It's not about resilience training or just working harder. It's simpler than that - streamlining the things that don't need to be complicated, taking unnecessary admin off people's plates, using tools that actually reduce workload rather than add to it.
When you clear out the noise, everything else tends to improve.
What stood out to me about the conversation with David wasn't just the subject matter, it was the way we talked about it. Openly, honestly, without performing everything-is-fine. That kind of conversation is rarer in this industry than it should be. And the more space we create for it, the better placed we are to deal with the realities of the job.
Property will always be fast-paced. It will always involve pressure. But it doesn't have to feel relentless. Better processes, better communication, better support structures... that's how you build something that actually works long-term. For your clients and for the people doing the work.
If you haven't caught the Viking Chats episode with David Mintz yet, it's worth a listen - not for the answers, but for the questions it asks.
