Commercial Real Estate Isn’t Always Ahead. Here’s What It Could Learn From UK Social Housing about Customer Insight

Written By Chenai Gondo

Topics covered in this article: This article explores themes including customer experience in the built environment, Tenant Satisfaction Measures (TSMs), social housing regulation in the UK, customer insight and benchmarking, residential and commercial real estate performance, property management best practice, resident engagement, and the growing role of experience strategy in real estate, Customer experience in real estate, Tenant Satisfaction Measures (TSMs), Social housing regulation, UK Customer insight and benchmarking, Residential vs commercial real estate, Built environment performance, Property management best practice, Resident engagement, Real estate customer satisfaction, Experience strategy in property

We often talk about commercial real estate being ahead of residential real estate - particularly social housing. In some ways, that’s absolutely true.

It is rare, for example, to read reports about a modern office building that is riddled with damp, mould, or unresolved basic maintenance failures in the way we sometimes see reported in parts of the residential sector. Commercial assets tend to have clearer operational accountability, stronger performance management, and faster escalation when things go wrong.

So yes - in many respects commercial real estate is ahead. But one thing I have learned from working across multiple parts of the built environment is this: No sector has a monopoly on good ideas.

And some of the most interesting insights come not from looking at your competitors, but from looking sideways.

The advantage of seeing multiple parts of the same industry

My own career has moved across different parts of the built environment. I worked at a large REIT for several years across retail, office and logistics - then the first startup I co-founded was focused on the UK residential market, mostly social housing. Today, I am lucky to work across all of those sectors at the same time.

That cross-sector experience has been one of the most valuable parts of my career. When you only work in one part of the industry, it’s easy to assume your way of doing things is the most advanced. When you work across sectors, you start to see something different. You start to see where each sector is solving problems the others are still debating.

What social housing has arguably moved faster on: measuring experience properly

One example of this is the introduction of Tenant Satisfaction Measures (TSMs) in UK social housing.

Since 2023, social housing providers have been required to measure resident satisfaction annually and publish the results. These results are not just internal management data. They are public - benchmarks exist, organisations can see how they compare with peers, boards review the results and so do regulators.

According to the government

TSMs are intended to be a tool to allow tenants to scrutinise their landlord’s performance, give insights to landlords on where they might look to improve their services, and provide a source of intelligence to the regulator on how far landlords are meeting the outcomes of the consumer standards."

In 2024/25 alone, almost half a million tenant perception surveys were completed across the UK social housing sector - with the majority collected as telephone surveys. That is an extraordinary volume of structured feedback about how people experience their homes, something many commercial portfolios would struggle to match at scale.

Customer experience is not treated as a “nice to have”. It is treated as part of how organisational performance is understood.

And that is interesting when you compare it with parts of commercial real estate, where customer insight is still sometimes: something done periodically, mostly kept internal, or something treated as feedback rather than performance intelligence.

Where each sector really does lead

If you look objectively, each part of the built environment has developed strengths. Commercial real estate has led on thinking about experience through the lens of hospitality, amenity strategy, brand, and workplace culture. There has been real innovation in how buildings compete to attract and retain occupiers.

Social housing, through a combination of mission and regulation, has arguably moved further on the systematic measurement of experience, on transparency, and on accountability for outcomes.These are different strengths, and the interesting opportunity is not deciding which sector is ahead.

It is asking what happens when you combine the best thinking from both.

The real advantage might just be perspective

If there is one thing working across sectors has reinforced for me, it is that the built environment is much more connected than we sometimes think.

We talk about residential, commercial, logistics and retail as if they are separate worlds. But ultimately they are all part of the same system: places designed, operated and experienced by people.

And the smartest organisations I see are not the ones obsessing about what their direct competitors are doing.They are the ones paying attention to good ideas wherever they appear. The real advantage isn’t being in the “most advanced” sector, but being able to see the patterns that sit across all of them.

The organisations that are moving fastest today are not necessarily the ones with the newest buildings or the biggest budgets. They are the ones that understand how people actually experience their spaces, and use that insight to make better operational and strategic decisions.

That applies whether you are operating offices, retail, logistics or residential portfolios.

At RealService , this is exactly the work we do

We are a customer experience consultancy for the built environment, specialising in customer insight, benchmarking, training and experience strategy across real estate sectors.

For more than 25 years we’ve helped owners, investors and operators understand how people really experience their buildings, and more importantly, what to do about it. If you're thinking about how customer experience fits into performance in your organisation, whether in residential or commercial real estate, I’m always interested in exchanging perspectives.

For more for insights like this, follow me: Chenai Gondo, PhD

Chenai Gondo
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