New research from Judd Farris recruitment has revealed that architects were the worst hit of all the property professionals by pay cuts brought on by the global financial crisis.
The Judd Farris Market Survey collated more than 2,000 responses from property professionals across Australia, from 2 to 9 October 2009.
Eighteen per cent of architects had endured a pay cut, compared to a 10 per cent average across the property sector, the study found. For some, salaries were cut by as much as 30 per cent, with a further 48 per cent experiencing a pay freeze.
This compares to pay cuts for 13 per cent of project managers and 12 per cent of construction professionals.
The number of architects employed on a contract or temporary basis plummeted from 13 per cent in March 2009 to 5 per cent in October.
Sixty per cent of firms made redundancies in the past 12 months, with the majority cutting their workforce by up to 5 per cent — a smaller figure than predicted. In March, 25 per cent of the professionals in the industry predicted the affected firms would cut from 5 to 25 per cent of their staff. The survey also found that developers’ in-house architects were worse hit than practice architects.
However, despite the pay cuts and redundancies, architects currently feel safer in their jobs than the rest of the property industry. While across the industry, 12 per cent of people said they felt insecure in their roles, only 9.8 per cent of architects voiced the same fears.
Employment opportunities for architects over the next 12 months are also positive, with the sector predicted to hire at an above-average rate. Fifty seven per cent of architecture firms said they are expecting to take on new staff in the coming year.
While in March, two thirds of architects expected to see more redundancies in their firms, in 2010 only 37 per cent of architects are bracing for further job losses.
The majority of architects were engaged on residential projects (37 per cent), and a further 8.5 per cent were working in the education sector.
This news comes as the Architects' Council of Europe’s (ACE) declares that there are “no green shoots” yet for the architectural profession in Europe.
The Council’s survey on the impact of the economic crisis on European architects shows that the worst may be still to come, despite some timid, positive signs of recovery. The survey reveals that more than a third of all architectural offices in Europe have cut staff numbers since September 2008 and the ACE predicts further redundancies later this year.
The recent ACE survey shows that the architectural profession may begin to see the end of the negative effects of the economic crisis sometime in 2010.
However, when mixed with indications from individual European Union Member States it appears that the effect of the economic crisis on architects’ offices varies considerably across regions.
The profession in Ireland, Poland, Hungary and Spain anticipates the situation will deteriorate further over the next three months, whereas in Germany, Finland, the UK and Austria architects anticipate an improvement. Unfortunately, the regions where the situation is expected to deteriorate outweigh those that anticipate improvements, the ACE said.
The American Institute of Architects (AIA) also yesterday released its three-year report on the profession for the time leading up to the recession. It shows that American architects enjoyed 54 per cent growth in from 2005 to 2008, equating to US $16 billion in gross billings.
The Business of Architecture: AIA Survey Report on Firm Characteristics also found a dramatic increase in the practice of green architecture. Fifty per cent of architecture firms report green design practices, up from 31 per cent of firms in 2005. Firms with 10 to 49 employees had the biggest gains in green design work, which increased from 48 per cent to 72 per cent in the last three years.
While there was a sharp rise in the number of minority licensed architects, increasing from 11 to 18 per cent, the gains were smaller for women over the same period with only one percent increases in the number of principals/partners and for all architectural staff.
The study also revealed sizeable gains in the number of firms using Building Information Modeling (BIM) software, rising from 34 percent in 2005 to 69 percent in 2008.
“While architecture firms are struggling considerably as the current economic slump continues unabated, there were extensive increases in revenue for the profession during the period this survey covered,” AIA chief economist Kermit Baker, said.
