A New Paradigm for Evaluating Performance of Property Management Agents

Mismanagement of multi-owned housing is common in Hong Kong, leading to accelerated building dilapidation and urban decay. While property management agents (PMAs) are usually employed for housing management on the homeowners’ behalf, a simple but theoretically sound measure to evaluate the performance of PMAs has been lacking. This paper reviews the existing measures for PMA performance evaluation. Then, a protocol to evaluate and compare performance of PMAs in Hong Kong is proposed. With regard to the protocol, the performance of a PMA is defined as its achievement in managing the housing development to the satisfaction of the residents and its endeavor to maintain the development in a good condition. The ideas underpinning the protocol and how a PMA’s performance is evaluated using the protocol are detailed. Before the paper is concluded, how the proposed measure for evaluating PMA performance is validated is discussed.