Passions stirred

What do tenants want? The question posed by Freud about women is one frequently asked by developers about end-users  – and it is almost as vexing. Knowing how to keep tenants happy is the secret to a long and happy landlord-tenant relationship,  and anything that keeps the romance alive can only be helpful. The good news, therefore, is that ‘Eurobuild CEE’ has commissioned a survey of end-users across Poland to find out what they like... and what can drive them apart

Richard Stephens, ‘Eurobuild CEE’:  What have you learnt from this survey?
Magdalena Tulaja, analyst, Millward Brown : This survey was different because of the nature of the real estate market, where the opinion of tenants means big money for owners, and so reputations are extremely important. They really try to take care of their tenants and look after their income, which meant they were very conscious of us and sometimes not really willing to share information.
Izabella Anuszewska, research unit director, Millward Brown : I think they should have welcomed this sort of exercise – it can be a valuable tool for property managers.
MT: Especially because it was independent. If the management carries out the survey itself then the owner cannot be sure that the information received is relevant.
IA: One interesting factor was that the owners and managers weren’t confident that ‘Eurobuild CEE’, as the publisher, wouldn’t use the information against them. In my opinion this reflects well on you as it means you are viewed as independent. Concerning the methodology, at the beginning we thought that the CAWI method, meaning ‘Computer Assisted Web Interview’, would be the most efficient way to carry out this survey, but it turned out not to be the case. It just  wasn’t convenient for this type of B2B respondent. So during the study we had to change methods and it became more face-to-face and telephone-based. About half of the survey responses were gathered from face-to-face interviews.
MT: One thing that struck me was how seriously people took the survey. That’s not to say I expected people to be impassive, but we encountered surprisingly strong reactions from the tenants, managers and owners of the projects. Generally they were enthusiastic about the survey being done, and interested in all aspects of it.

Was that the case in all sectors?
MT: Yes, in all three sectors. But it went both ways. There were some project managers who didn’t like the survey at all. They felt that it was invasive of their business and that the data collected might work against their interests. It was actually a friendly survey, but a couple of shopping centre managers and owners called us to say that they objected to their tenants being asked questions. There were no neutral attitudes towards the survey.

And if someone objected, did you carry on regardless?
IA: Yes, at least we tried. It’s not against the law to ask people for information, but of course we respected tenants’ refusals. We found the study interesting, methodologically demanding and pretty challenging because we had to employ a mixture of several types of methodology to get the information. We had to stay closely in touch with both the interviewees and the managers of the projects. But it didn’t go as easily as I assumed it would at the beginning.

RS: Were any of the findings surprising for you?
IA: I don\'t suppose this is surprising, but in all three sectors the location of the project was ranked as the most important factor for tenants, followed by costs.
MT: What was surprising was that building management was ranked as the least important factor in all three sectors.
You see, tenants were asked to rank elements of the centre  in order of importance. In alphabetical order these were: the building’s technical conditions, architectural and internal design, financial aspects, layout and signage, location, management, marketing and PR, and the tenant mix. The ranking was used to weight the relative importance of each question in the questionnaire.
IA: This can mean two things: either that people are less concerned about the scheme’s management because they are quite happy with it, or on the other hand they don’t see the influence of the centre manager on their day-to-day business.
MT: The point about the survey is that it was not investigating hard facts, but was surveying tenant satisfaction – and this is something that does not necessarily correspond to rankings of projects according to hard data. We think this fact makes the information from the study even more valuable, because tenant satisfaction is an important factor in business decisions.

Was there anything during the tenant interviews that you particularly remember?
IA: The situation which I remember most vividly took place while interviewing warehouse tenants. We experienced the whole spectrum of responses from the interviewees in this part of the survey. For example one of them, when asked to take part in our short survey, spent quite a lot of time expressing his indignation about the fact that he was not going to be properly paid for providing us with the information. He cited the example of his sister-in-law, who received money for participating in one particular market research survey. You could say that the idea of a report based on tenants’ opinions was completely alien to him. Fortunately, such responses were rare, and most tenants and facility managers were quite active with regard to the delivery of questionnaires and submitting them after they had been filled in. We employed a variety of technologies in order to do this. For example, we sent the questionnaires in the form of pdf files, which were then printed, filled in and sent back to us by fax. In the case of the warehouse sector, such situations occurred more often because reaching tenants personally to hand them the questionnaires was much more difficult for our pollsters than in the case of offices or shopping centres.
MT: I remember a situation which happened when we were approaching tenants in office buildings. The facility manager of one of them sent us an official document expressing his indignation about the fact that we were trying to contact his tenants. The document even included a warning that he would start legal proceedings against us if we proceeded. Of course, we asked for a legal opinion  of the situation ourselves, but before we got this we received some different news. It turned out that the tenants of the office building were exceptionally keen on filling in our questionnaires, and so the survey was successfully finished. Out of sheer curiosity I wanted to check later what results the office building achieved in our final report. And it turned out that it was ranked quite highly… Experiences such as this showed us that tenants’ opinions matter. Even if their systematic collection and publishing initially evokes a certain sense of mistrust, all facility managers can actually reap benefits from this.

The highest rated office, shopping centre and warehouse will be announced at the Eurobuild Awards Gala, hosted by Grażyna Torbicka, on Wednesday 8th December at the Hilton Hotel in Warsaw. Findings from the survey will be published in the Eurobuild Awards special supplement. For more information please go to  www.eurobuildawards.com