Supply Chain Management in Real Estate Practices: The Estate Surveyor and Valuers’ Perspective

Real estate practice is a strategic and multi-faceted vocation that connects the clients/owners of real estate projects or products with end users in the building industry. Different aspects of real estate practices require collaboration of real estate practitioners who are professional estate surveyors and valuers, with the built environment professionals and other stakeholders at different levels in order to achieve the transaction objectives. This study, therefore, examined the practice with a view to uncovering the preparedness of the estate surveyors and valuers with respect to the knowledge and application of supply chain management in real estate practices. Empirical data were collected with the aide of questionnaires administered to respondents from the 373 estate firms in Lagos State, Nigeria of which 291 were duly completed and returned constituting 78% rate of response. The Readiness Assessment Model was adapted to determine the operational preparedness of the estate surveying and valuation firms to implement supply chain management with regards to management readiness, employee readiness, services/processes readiness and logistic/ICT readiness on a 5-point Likert scale and the corresponding mean score and relative importance was determined. The Kolmogorov Smirnov Test of Normality was performed and showed that the data was normally distributed. Hence, the Pearson Product Moment Correlation analysis was used to determine the relationship between knowledge and application of supply chain management in real estate businesses. It was observed, among others, that the knowledge of supply chain management is generally low among estate valuers and does not necessarily translate to application in the property market transactions of real estate firms. The study further observed that management and employees of estate surveying and valuation firms do not have adequate knowledge of the principles and practices of supply chain management for productive engagement in property market transactions. This was further identified alongside others such as confidentiality, stiff rivalry and economic instability as critical factors resisting the adoption of supply chain management in the property market. The study therefore suggested capacity building programmes on supply chain management for the estate surveyors and valuers to improve the knowledge of the strategy and harness the benefits.