MidEast real estate execs earn $10,335 per month

Average salaries of real estate professionals in the Middle East fell slightly to just under AED38,000 per month, Macdonald & Company, the property recruitment specialist, said on Tuesday.

Its annual salary study showed that the average base salary was AED37,965 per month ($10,335), compared to last year's figure of AED38,351 per month.

The survey, completed in collaboration with The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) and Cityscape Connect, said 30 percent of respondents received an increase in their base salaries this year, compared to only 25 percent last year.

Another five percent suffered pay cuts compared to 11 percent last year while 42 percent saw no variance in their wages.

The survey further showed that the average bonus was increased to AED76,431 from AED73,246, a 4.4 percent, with 40 percent of respondents saying they received a bonus in the last 12 months.

Twenty-one percent of respondents said they had been made redundant in the past year, a three percent decrease compared to 2010.

Ben Waddilove, Middle East director, Macdonald and Company, told Arabian Business: “Essentially [salaries] are pretty much the same as they were before but out of people that have been given an increase, slightly more people have been given an increase this year.

“I’d say that is relatively positive because we’ve had a lot of uncertainty globally, and we have had a lot of uncertainty in the region.”

He added that there had been more redundancies of expats in semi-government development companies, due to Emiratisation.

From the total number of individuals that were made redundant, 78 percent said they have already found employment.

"The current situation is challenging but we expect that the Gulf States will be resilient to global economic uncertainty and we will be looking for rebuild stories as the Arab Spring plays out," he added.

A total of 1,439 real estate professionals from across the Middle East region took part in this year's survey, with a higher percentage of respondents based in the UAE, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

Waddilove said hiring tendencies have changed with employers having quite a lot of options these days.

“There are fewer senior positions. In the last three to six months, we have only had one CEO position. There are more manager-level to mid-level roles now, ‘the doers’ in the company,” he added.