Agent Behavior and Customer Satisfaction in Residential Real Estate Market in Uganda

The paper investigates the behavior of real estate agents and customer satisfaction in the residential real estate market in Kampala City, Uganda. The city’s residential housing market though growing depicts a disequilibrium position between the demand and the investment/supply generally. It is a highly segmented market with oversupply in the high and undersupply in the low-income categories. To obtain a residential unit, customers approach the numerous real estate agents in their various operation locations to inquire about the offers on the market. The landlords multiple list their vacant residential units to numerous agents to transact but usually with no mechanism of updating the agents on the conclusion of the transactions. This information asymmetry and behavior of agents lead the customers to mistrust the agents in their delivery of the desired services. Since the agents charge a one-off commission tagged to a monthly rental income, the propensity to inflate rental rates is high in order to maximize the commission they earn but also exploiting the customers who enter long term contracts with the landlords.To study the above problem, we use a cross sectional design and examine the behavior of real estate agents in the lower market segment. The data will be collected using a five Likert scale questionnaire and analyze it using SPSS to generate descriptive and inferential statistics on the findings. We expect that the results will be of significant relevance to policy makers and scholars in understanding the real estate residential sector. The implications will suggest that behavior and honesty of the agents may be the expected norm, and thus leads to satisfaction with the service encounter instead of the current perception that creates dissatisfaction.