Managing “keep” factors of office tenants to raise satisfaction and loyalty

The purpose of this paper is to add to behavioural property literature and improve the landlord‐tenant relationship, through exploring the effect of office (location and building) “keep”, push and pull factors on satisfaction and loyalty of tenants.

Structured face‐to‐face interviews with 38 office tenants are used to identify the important push, pull and “keep” factors and their effects. The results are placed within marketing theories on competition and customer intimacy, and translated into management implications.

The analyses indicate that retaining a tenant requires more relationship efforts than competing through offering a good price/quality ratio. A lot of subjectivity is involved in the tenant's valuation process of “keep” factors, which are mostly functional. Push and pull factors are mostly technical, but can only raise satisfaction up to a certain level.

The sample was confined to two multi‐tenant buildings with small tenants in one region. In the future, the approach should be extended to other regions and tenant types and repeated in time to get longitudinal results.

The empirical results can assist landlords in managing their office buildings better. Landlords can also use the structured interviews as a customer‐relationship management instrument.

This paper gives more insight in “keep” factors and how they can help benefit the relationship between landlord and tenant(s). Also it places studies on tenants' choices and building factors within existing marketing theories on competition.