Quality assessment system for property management services in residential properties by reliability interval method (RIM)

Abstract

In Hong Kong, the responsibility for building management falls on property owners. To assist in building management, most property owners would appoint a property management company. Fulfilling relevant statutory requirements is mandatory for property management companies; however, it is debatable if meeting the basic statutory requirements is equivalent to providing quality property management services for property owners. In fact, property owners usually have more requests than minimum statutory requirements and it is therefore a multi-factor evaluation system for quality of residential property management services is proposed in this research project.

To develop the assessment system, quality property management services criteria, including dimensions and performance items, are identified through desk research and focus group interviews with owners’ representatives and property management practitioners. Interval score and ranking are then assigned to the identified assessment criteria by distributing questionnaires with pilot test to owners’ representatives, property management practitioners and building management team of Home Affairs Department of HKSAR. Data collected from the questionnaire are analyzed with weight assessment method: Reliability Interval Method (RIM) in which importance weightings of the criteria can be developed and statistical analysis is allowed. “Repair and Maintenance (excluding clubhouse facilities, if applicable)” and “Effectiveness of emergency repair and maintenance services”, which are not statutory requirements for managing residential properties, are respectively weighted as the most important dimension and performance item.

As far as application of the developed quality assessment system is concerned, services quality provided by major property management companies are measured and compared with questionnaires to students pursuing Housing Management in University of Hong Kong. The correlation between quality of property management services and numbers of properties managed by the company is not statistically significant; however, this is likely due to a small samples size, as the visual display of data suggests a relationship.

One interesting finding in this research is the high factor weight of assessment criteria which are not statutory requirements for managing residential properties. Such a result implies that meeting basic statutory requirements is not equivalent to providing quality property management services in the eyes of property owners. Besides, this research provides a framework for future development of a classification system to indicate how good a property is for meeting specific overall grading. This research is important because quality of property management services in residential properties can be quantified and closely monitored with the developed quality assessment system in a performance-based, simple and standard way from the perspective of property owners. As far as the benefits of property management companies, which sell services in keen market, are concerned, it is expected that the system could keep supervising and thus improving the quality of services; delivery of high quality services is a profitable way to differentiate ones from the competitors.