Relevance Of High-Quality Landlord-Tenant-Relationships In Housing Companies

Growing internationalization and professionalization of the housing industry on the one hand, changing demographic circumstances, increasing requirements of quality levels and other shift in demand on the other hand can be conducted on German housing markets. These market dynamic changes the business environment, creates new challenges and affects every type of housing company, non-profit as well as yield oriented. Thus an increasing marketisation of the housing industry can be constituted. Aspects like efficiency, transparency about the work performed and applicable management techniques become more and more important. Therefore two assumptions should be constituted and proved in this paper. The first assumption assumes a growing importance of market-oriented structures for housing companies. In this case high-quality management of the landlordtenant- relationship can be a good leverage to improve the market orientation. The second assumption presumes th at housing companies have weaknesses in managing the customer relationships. If both assumptions are right, a professional value oriented and high-quality customer relationship management (CRM) is an important success factor of housing companies in the future. In this paper it will be shown that many literature-based arguments can be determined to accept the first assumption. Results of empirical data, based on interviews with CEOs of German housing companies in 2006 and 2007, show that the housing industry has indeed high potential to optimize their customer relationship management to meet the market requirements. Therefore a gap between requirements and implementation in terms of CRM in the housing industry can be adopted.