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1. Introduction
Traditionally, the business logic in renting business premises was to build the premises at the right location and then rent the premises to the businesses first in line. The competitive environment is changing and the real estate owners are seeking new ways of differentiating themselves from competitors. Discussions with real estate owners reveal that one possible way to add value to the tenants might be through creating tight and long-lasting customer relationships. To do this, it is important to know what the customers value in their relationships with their landlords.
One way to understand this landlord and tenant relationship is to draw understanding from relationship quality literature. This literature offers a framework of some 15 attributes that are believed to affect relationship quality perceptions. This article introduces these 15 attributes and then utilizes them in landlord and tenant relationship in order to understand this one specific type of customer relationship. The empirical data are gathered by interviewing ten persons in five tenant organizations. The findings are then validated with a workshop with individuals from landlord organizations.
This work contributes to existing knowledge both managerially and theoretically and brings relationship quality thinking to a new business sector. For those real estate owners who consider improving customer relationships with their tenants as a way to add value to the tenants and through that improve their success in business, this paper gives some fresh evidence on improving customer relationships in a positive direction.
2. Theoretical background of the relationship quality construct
There have been two separate approaches to relationship quality issues. First, relationship quality has been studied in business-to-customer services where the main focus has been on the interpersonal relationships between individual customers and sales personnel (see for example [9] Crosby et al. , 1990; [28] Lagace et al. 1991; [4] Bejou et al. 1996; [44] Shamdasani and Balakrishnan, 2000).
Another stream of relationship quality literature sees the construct in a wider context. This literature concentrates on business-to-business relationships and on the attributes that make a business relationship valuable in the eyes of business partners ([27] Kumar et al. , 1995; [18] Henning-Thurau and Klee, 1997; [11] Dorsch et al. , 1998; [19] Henning-Thurau, 2000; [30] Lang and Colgate, 2003). This view of relationship quality...