Ability to work and health & safety: property user concerns and satisfaction

ABSTRACT

The satisfaction of property users with facilities and property management has been found to be affected, amongst others, by building features. However, we argue that the importance of building features for user satisfaction varies across user concerns about their ability to work and health & safety. We hypothesise that building comfort increases in importance for the satisfaction of users with ability to work concerns, compared to those without these concerns. Additionally, building cleanliness is of higher importance to users with health & safety concerns than those without. In our empirical analysis, we use a sample of 1,895 respondents from a multi-year survey (2015–2019) and employ mixed-effects regression. Our results are in line with expectations and suggest a moderating effect of user concerns on the relations of building features and user satisfaction. We also find a consistent impact of user expectations on their satisfaction. Our findings are relevant to property and facilities managers as they suggest that accounting for user concerns allows a more differentiate understanding of user satisfaction, which may be particularly important following the COVID-19 pandemic.

KEYWORDS:

• User satisfaction
• facilities and property management
• health & safety
• ability to work
• mixed effects regression

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Julia Freybote

Julia Freybote is an Associate Professor in finance & real estate in the School of Business at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon (USA). She holds a PhD in real estate from Georgia State University and has published in journals such as Real Estate Economics, the Journal of Real Estate Research, Journal of Property Research, Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics and Journal of Housing Research. Her research interests include real estate finance and investment, ESG, climate risk, PropTech/FinTech and behavioural real estate.

Riëtte Carstens

Riëtte Carstens is a senior lecturer in real estate investment & finance in the Department of Business Management at Stellenbosch University (South Africa). She holds a PhD from the University of Stellenbosch Business School. Her research interests include real estate investment and finance, textual analysis, REITs and ESG. Her research has been published in the Journal of Real Estate Research, Journal of Property Research, Journal of Real Estate Portfolio Management and Journal of Real Estate Literature.