Assessing the impact of tenant satisfaction on rent arrears in residential properties.

Abstract

Provision of housing to all has become an important guide to various organizations and bodies particularly the United Nations as well as national guidelines that provide for need of shelter for citizens. Adequate housing is therefore a multi-faced and complex ideology. As a result, achieving access in regards to adequate housing in the Habitat Agenda is a big challenge to very many households mainly in the developing countries where the urban population is growing at a rapid rate and yet the significant majority of urban residents cannot afford decent housing delivered by the market systems partly due to their low- and inconsistent-income streams. Consequently, it is inevitable that public agencies provide or facilitate access to affordable and decent public housing due to the market system inadequacies that lead to a lot of housing deficiencies of the poor emanating. Although housing rents are often relatively lower compared to market and sometimes economic rents in various similar neighborhood areas, the management of housing by various owners in most countries is often bedeviled by poor maintenance, rent arrears and usually, tenants are unsatisfied with their living environments. These factors set in a vicious cycle which contributes towards the general decline of housing. To tackle these objectives this research uses a conceptual framework grounded on a modification of the Analytical Hierarchical Process which is a statistical technique for testing and estimating causal relationships using a combination of statistical data and qualitative causal assumptions. In this conceptual framework four main focus areas of tenant satisfaction namely building features, building quality, neighborhood aspects and management are latent variables