Customer Relationship Management of German Real Estate Companies - Results of an Empirical Study

The conditions of the residential or commercial real estate rental market in Germany has been changed in the last years for the benefit of the tenants. This causes new challenges for real estate companies with rental core business. They have to react with new sales and marketing strategies, which focus more than up to now on the customer instead on the property itself. After all, the risk/return-ratio of real estate investments notably depends on the companiesí abilities concerning acquisition and customer relationship. A company should therefore aim at a high loyalty of the customers with a high sustainable customer value. To realise this, a lot of information about the tenants are necessary. Customer relationship management (CRM) is the instrument to get and manage this information. The successful application in other lines of businesses shows that CRM could generate competitive advantage for the respective company. Therefore the aim of the following research is the finding of the CRM usage in real estate companies in Germany. The results of a survey records the customer orientation of real estate companies and provides the empirical database for the analysis about the strengths and weaknesses of customer relationship setting of property companies. For this purpose 234 interviews with managers were realised. The standardised questionnaire contained about 140 questions, which comprise thematically the whole customer lifecycle from the acquisition to customer win-back. The results of the data analysis show that the attended companies have accumulated needs in terms of customer orientation and customer relationship management.