3 minute read
Trends
— TRENDS —
The Home Dream Team
Grand estates have always needed staff. It turns out the rest of us might, too. by Andrea Bennett
Home-management firms oversee services from landscaping to pool maintenance.
THE DECADE between 2008 and 2018 marked the largest U.S. economic expansion on record— and with it came an explosion in job growth for services to wealthy households. In fact, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, the market for so-called wealth workers, a term coined by economics professor David Autor, outpaced the nation’s overall job growth. The rise in demand for jobs such as massage therapists (105 percent), animal caretakers (58 percent), personal financial advisers (37 percent), and other household professional services has been unprecedented.
And while there has always been a lucrative business in household management among the country’s grandest estates, a confluence of events has led a wider variety of households to rethink their ideas about staffing, says Adeel Mallick, CEO and cofounder of Humming Homes. Namely, household service no longer belongs exclusively to the super-rich. Humming Homes, a new technology-based household-management company headquartered in Manhattan, cites an increase in the number of dual-income-earning households, a new shift toward first-time home purchases, and more recently a reversal in the longtime urbanization trend (accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic), which has resulted in a massive move to affluent suburbs for many families.
“Today, 66 percent of households are represented by dual-income earners,” Mallick says. “Suddenly you have first-time homebuyers who have gone from renting managed places to owning” and are unprepared for the expense and overwhelming tasks of upkeep and maintenance, which can account for $20,000 per year for a million-dollar home. “People who would never have thought to employ an estate manager before, even though they have a $3 million home,” are finding themselves looking to staff up—just in a different way from, say, a $20 million estate that requires live-in service staff.
EXPERTS BEHIND THE SCENES
Humming Homes’ solution is to provide and schedule home services like landscaping, housekeeping, pool maintenance, and even HVAC through an app, which their clients use after meeting with their own (human) home manager. “We have an expert network behind the scenes—people who have had 20 years of estate management,” says cofounder Kyle Carnes. The service will also proactively remind you of what your house needs, since your home and appliance data are logged. Humming Homes currently operates in the Hamptons, with plans to expand into Greenwich, Connecticut; Westchester, New York; and South Florida by the end of the year.
Some of the best-known domestic home-staffing companies include Lindquist Group, which has been operating since 1890 for families like the Roosevelts, Carnegies, and Rockefellers, and has offices in Greenwich, New York City, Palm Beach, and Miami. British American Household Staffing, which operates on the East and West Coasts and in London, also specializes
An estate manager can alleviate the stresses of maintaining a second home.
in staffing yachts. And the Pavillion Agency, which is now the largest household-staffing agency in the U.S., provides centralized payroll and HR services, as well as personalized consulting to households.
To master the daunting task of first-time home management, Mallick says, your onboarding team will do a thorough walk-through of your house, cataloging room and appliance data for proactive monitoring and getting started on top-of-mind projects almost immediately. “The majority of homes won’t require a full-time role, and that’s where we can democratize the ‘estate manager’ and give homeowners the peace of mind that their unique needs are being met.” After all, there’s no other place that a person is more emotionally invested in than their home, Mallick says.
