Lisney asks staff to take 10% pay cut

STAFF at leading Irish real estate agency, Lisney, have been asked by management to take a 10% pay cut as the downturn in the property market continues to bite.

The move, by one of the largest companies in its field here, will affect everyone from management downwards at its offices in Dublin, Cork and Belfast.

Lisney currently employs around 170 people in total, every one of whom have been personally sounded out about the plan by management.

The company’s managing director, Peter Stapleton, said yesterday that — at the moment — redundancies are not planned. “This is an attempt, on our part, to avoid having to cut jobs. There are, obviously, alternatives to this but we don’t want to go down that route,” Mr Stapleton commented.

“There have been a considerable number of redundancies in our market in the last 12 months, many of which haven’t been reported on for whatever reason, and there will undoubtedly be more in time. We’re just responding to the changing market conditions,” he said.

“We would see these challenging market conditions continuing for at least another 18 months. There’s no magic wand to make things better,” he added.

Mr Stapleton said that he hoped the wage move would not result in anyone leaving voluntarily, but added that they would have to wait and see if that happened or not.