“Oi, part-timer” is a phrase often chucked at the lazy, the late and the hopeless as a means of denigrating someone that is not working to expectations. We’ve all heard it said and most of us have probably used it as a jibe from time to time.

Even in formal employment parlance, ‘part-time’ has usually been thought of as confined to casual roles. Unskilled perhaps. Or at least that’s the common perception.

According to the Office for National Statistics the average part-time hourly rate in the UK is £10.39 and the typical part-timer earns a mere £11,234 per year. This, at first glance, does rather seem to set expectations for the genre at a low ebb.

Off My Trolley

My first ever job was part-time. I was 13. It involved the huge responsibility of finding abandoned shopping trollies within the vicinity of the local supermarket and dragging herds of them back to safe keeping whilst they were all pulling in different directions. Actually, perhaps that rather stood me in good stead for what was to come later in my career as I often wrestled to cajole certain eMoov shareholders similarly (insert your own alternative punchline here, by all means).

These days we talk enthusiastically about side-hustles and the gig-economy – really just dressed up terms for ‘part-time’, but I suppose they sound so much funkier and more glamorous than telling people that you ride a bike with a box on the back full of pizzas. Importantly, technology and new-fangled communication methods have enabled not just commercial agility but also the illusion of place and presence – and a certain efficiency of time that now allows more to be done in less time – a modern part-timer’s utopia.

Being casual in one’s labour is not the preserve of dinner ladies, cleaners, cab drivers and shelf stackers. There is no stigma, nor should there ever have been, to being a part-time worker. Certainly not nowadays.

To better illustrate this, one particular person I’m aware of has already earned £31,000 as a part-timer in just the first three months of 2021. Over £120,000 a year for a so-called slacker – not bad at all.

The person in question is good though, very good. In fact, I’d say they are amongst the best there is at their profession – estate agency. Yes, estate agency. Granted they are especially skilled, tenacious, quick to see an opportunity and a fantastic relationship builder. But, their estate agency endeavours occupy less than 10% of their working week albeit that they often spend their weekends on valuations and viewings, all in order to keep their hand-in, so to speak.

Let’s put that into perspective for a second. They’ve earned £10,000 a month whilst 90% of their time is devoted to other things, whether those things are their main job or a business or their family. Or education. Or kite-surfing – or whatever.

A part-time estate agent. That’s not something previously contemplated as particularly viable by the backward looking, staid world of corporate agency. Just imagine rocking up to an interview as a lister at Connells or Bairstow Eves and explaining that you want to work half a day per week but for over a hundred grand a year? That would be one short interview, but no doubt a fun one as the laughter resonated around the building cheering you through the exit.

Yet, this very scenario of earning well whilst on tick-over is now being achieved by some.

Gender

Women make up the majority of those that work part-time. A recent Parliamentary research paper suggests that part-time workers are three times more likely to be women than men. In fact 38% of employed women work part-time. This means that the gender pay gap automatically skews to disadvantage females.

Only 17% of SME leaders are women, according to the same source. Just 29% of FTSE 100 directors are women and only 27% of those in FTSE 250 companies.

More women than men have been furloughed. Mothers are 1.5 times more likely than fathers to have lost their job since the start of the first lockdown. The list goes on…

I venture that part-time work is favoured by more women than men because those women want the flexibility that goes with such work. Starting later, finishing earlier to, at the risk of me being inaccurately labelled a sweeping misogynist, accommodate childcare. As politically incorrect as it may be for us to ‘assume’ that this is why, it would seem to be a fact even if it is not right in this day and age that women bear the greater responsibility for looking after the kids than male-folk. I think women should be getting a better deal commercially.

So, let’s recap.

• Part-time roles were the preserve of low-wage casual work. But less so now as attitudes and tech have improved
• Part-time working remains attractive for some of us that need time to do other things too
• Within our industry the archaic attitude to part-time fee earners is changing now that estate agency models are evolving, whereas previously it was rendered an unattractive prospect for those that want/need to earn big money but without wanting to be chained to a corporate desk 9 to 5. The ‘self-employed’ route via Keller Williams, eXp, Fine and Country etc has opened up an opportunity for a chunk of society that previously found the sector unsuitable or impractical to consider. Women especially

By the way, that £31k part-timer…. is me. And whilst of course I am somewhat superhuman and therefore it’s to be expected, I have managed to close five property deals myself this year – homes that I’ve listed and sold and completed on in my spare time.

I’m not a woman nor a mum, though I did have a mum once (and a dad, despite popular opinion) and actually I reckon that if I was a woman or a mum, I’d have squeezed in a couple more deals besides.

We’re going to start to see some big earning, part-time superstars in estate agency. And a few of them might even be men.