Switching behaviour in property related professional services

Abstract

Traditionally, when trying to understand property markets researchers have tended to take a positivist approach and assume rational decision-making behaviour. More recently, however, alternative non-positivist approaches have been used to understand the behaviour of the different participants within these markets. These approaches allow us to discover the importance of social structures and processes. This paper explores social processes within the context of clients and providers of professional property services within the Auckland market. Customer retention and loyalty is a major goal of property service providers because of the negative impact of lost customers on a company's profit and market share. It is thus important for any service provider to ascertain the reasons for their clients' decisions to leave them for their competitors. A considerable amount of work in the marketing literature has explored the customer's decision to switch from one service provider to another. Little research, however, has been undertaken in the context of property service providers. This paper investigates customers' reasons for switching property service providers within a business-to-business context. The method for this study is by means of in-depth interviews with a number of experienced clients who regularly use the services of valuers, real estate agents, architects and lawyers. The results uncover several key reasons for switching across different types of service providers and clients within the context of property markets.