Corporate real estate keepfactors and customer intimacy strategies

In the current demand-driven European office markets, attracting new tenants is difficult. To limit vacancy rates, asset managers are shifting focus towards also trying to retain current tenants through relationship marketing and customer intimacy strategies. The service profit chain endorses this shift, pointing out that a satisfied tenant is a loyal tenant who is less inclined to move. So growing research attention is paid to factors that keep a tenant satisfied. Originating from the behavioural location decision theory from the 1960s, tenants have been proven to base location decisions (like moving) both on objective and subjective aspects; in later studies these aspects are called (objective and subjective) push- and pull factors. Recently keep factors have been mentioned as a third category of factors, but little research has been devoted to them so far. This first exploratory research gives more insight in keep factors of office tenants and their relation to push and pull factors, satisfaction and loyalty.Data have been gathered by holding structured interviews with 38 companies in 2 multi-tenant office buildings. Statistical analyses of these data showed that while more than half of the push and pull factors positively correlate with each other (especially the ones mentioned often), keep factors are mostly a significantly different category. Both keep factors and push/pull factors correlate with satisfaction. A tenant is pushed/pulled away most if a building is not up to date (maintenance, quality of fittings). Flexibility and being close to (the facilities of) the inner city are the main keep factors that bring about a satisfied tenant. Representativeness of both the building and its surroundings are mentioned fairly often as keep factor and as push/pull factor for both buildings, implying that for some factors satisfaction is based on subjective judgements of this factor and thus might be susceptible to customer intimacy management activities. The results imply that (facility) management activities for keeping the building up to date are most important to make sure a tenant is not pushed/pulled away to another location. To actually stimulate him to stay is harder. Flexibility and the distance to the inner city are mainly fixed during the design of a building, and not easily changed after completion. These factors should thus receive ample attention when adding an office to a real estate portfolio, because it will make vacancy management easier during the entire utilisation period.