Evaluating the Performance of Property Management Agents in Apartment Buildings in Hong Kong

Mismanagement of multi-storey residential building is common in Hong Kong, leading to accelerated ageing and building dilapidation. While property management agents (PMAs) can be employed to manage buildings on residents’ behalf, there is a lack of a simple and consistent measure to evaluate the performance of PMAs. PMA’s performance was commonly measured by key building performance indicators, which could lead to wrongly ascribe a dilapidated building to the inferior performance of the PMA. This study aims to develop a standard method to assess and compare the performance of PMAs. The performance of a PMA is defined as its achievement in managing the building to the satisfaction of the residents and its endeavor to maintain the building in a good condition. In this study, the performance of a PMA is divided into a) tangible dimension-PMA efforts to building condition, and b) intangible dimension-the way PMA service is delivered. A total of 300 multi-storey residential buildings in Hong Kong will be sampled for building condition assessment. Demographic characteristics of residents in the sample buildings and PMA’s service delivery will be collected. Using those data, tangible dimension scores will be computed with reference to building conditions. Other exogenous factors, including building’s inborn attributes, residents’ characteristics, and coordination mechanisms will be controlled. Intangible dimension scores will be computed using Principal Component Analysis (PCA). Combining tangible dimension scores and intangible scores, performance scores for PMAs in those sampled buildings will be computed. These performance scores will be tested against the level of management fees charged by the PMAs to determine whether the residents are receiving value for money services from their PMAs. The practical and research implications of the proposed study are: 1) a like-with-like framework for comparing PMA’s performance, and 2) a potential extension to evaluate other facility management services and for different building types.