Digitalisering och fastighetsmäklares kundrelationer : Digitaliseringens interaktion med mäklarens kundrelationer

The real estate brokerage profession has been undergoing a significant digital transformation, characterized by the development of new communication channels, more efficient information management tools, and increasingly automated work processes. These advancements are creating shortcuts in the daily routines of real estate brokers. However, the impact of these changes on the establishment and maintenance of customer relationships, which are crucial for success in the profession, had not been clearly understood. Previous research on the creation of robust customer relationships and digital communication sheds light on important aspects of this area. The aim of the study was to investigate how the use of digital tools, to the extent it is used today, interacts with the establishment and maintenance of customer relationships. An overlying focus has been on the factors that earlier studies define as the foundation of a well functioning relationship between a client and service provider. This was conducted qualitatively through semi-structured interviews with real estate brokers active in Swedish cities of various sizes. The interview questions were divided into segments to understand the respondents' views on importance of customer relationships, their use of digital tools, and how the two interact. The study's results show that customer relationships are, from the perspective of a real estate agent, the most essential part of their work and its success. They also believe that the digitalization of tasks frees up time, improves communication efficiency, and simplifies information dissemination. The real estate agents emphasize that digital tools as they are cannot form a relationship with a customer, but rather work as complement to the agents role in the same aspect. The respondents, who unanimously agree that the implementation of digital tools is positive for their profession, also emphasize the importance of a proven learning process, that digitalization becomes less effective when the counterpart in a customer relationship is less digitized and finally that the simplification of their work as a result of digitizing it should and can not be used as a shortcut in establishing a relationship.