What does your reputation actually cost you? What Lauryn Hill and Beyonce Can Teach Us About Customer Experience in Real Estate

Everyone thought I was an idiot for buying tickets to see Lauryn Hill live this weekend.

Lauryn Hill has a famously terrible reputation for live performances. She cancels shows, turns up late and, when she does eventually arrive, has been known to perform completely reworked versions of her songs. So when I told people I was going to see her this weekend, everyone was like "She's never going to turn up!"

The thing is, I love Lauryn Hill. The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill was my first CD. It's one of the greatest albums ever made. I knew the risks when I bought the tickets and decided to take my chances.

My husband did not. He flatly refused to come with me, so I went with my thrill-seeking friends instead.

CREDIT: Google Search

The good news is that Lauryn Hill turned up. Take that, doubters!

The whole evening was pretty chaotic. Erykah Badu performed, and she was fine, but then came an incredibly long lull for a music festival. There was a low-effort DJ set that lasted 2 hours. At one point Dave Chappelle came on stage and - get this - didn't tell any jokes! What did he do instead, you ask? He lit up a cigarette and did what I can only describe as karaoke.

Then he brought a French guy on stage to play the harmonica. French harmonica dude was fine, but that's not the festival we signed up for. They were clearly improvising and trying to buy time.

Eventually the Fugees came out - about two hours late, and when she actually performed, you were reminded why thousands of people were waiting for her in the first place. She is Lauryn Hill. The songs are incredible, the voice is unmistakable and almost three decades later an entire crowd still knows every word.

The bad news was that we didn't get that much Lauryn Hill.

She brought her sons out to perform for a huge chunk of her set. Now, as a mother, I understand wanting to give your kids a chance. I would probably find a way to get my daughter up there too.

But Lauryn, start sooner so we can have some sympathy for your plight. When you've already kept everyone waiting and there's a curfew looming, giving a sizeable chunk of the remaining time to your children is a harder sell.

Sure enough, she ran out of time and the organisers simply cut her off in the middle of a song. The lights came on, the music stopped and that was it. It was surreal, we could see her and Wyclef jumping up and down on stage but there was no sound coming out. Then we got the message below.

We were furious.

But should we really have been surprised? Her reputation precedes her.

Lauryn Hill released The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill in 1998. It remains her only solo studio album. There aren't many musicians who could make one extraordinary album in their early twenties and coast on it for the next three decades.

That's pretty boss.

And perhaps that's why the reputation has been allowed to develop in the first place. If people want what you're selling badly enough, they'll tolerate things they wouldn't accept from anybody else.

But even extraordinary goodwill isn't infinite. When I got home and told my husband what had happened, he said.

“This is why you were watching Lauryn Hill in a field in Milton Keynes instead of a sold-out Wembley Stadium.”

Harsh, but probably fair. And he had already proved his own point. He likes Lauryn Hill, but her reputation was enough to make him refuse to buy a ticket. She hadn't lost him because the product wasn't good enough. She'd lost him because he didn't trust her to deliver it.

It made me wonder what that concert might have looked like if Lauryn Hill had a reputation more like, say, Beyoncé.

I've seen Beyoncé in concert too, and the expectation is completely different. Beyoncé has built a reputation for putting on an extraordinary show. You expect her to respect her audience, turn up and deliver a meticulously produced performance. People are prepared to spend serious money to see her because they have a reasonable expectation that whatever else happens, Beyoncé's going to put on a show.

Her tickets command many multiples of what I paid to see Lauryn Hill. There are obviously lots of reasons for that, but reputation must surely be part of the equation. One artist has trained her customers to expect excellence. The other has trained hers to wonder whether she'll turn up at all.

What is your reputation costing you?

My Lauryn Hill experience got me thinking about reputation. In real estate customer experience, we often talk about the three Rs: revenue, retention and reputation. Most clients naturally focus on retention first. Are occupiers happy enough to stay? Will they renew? Are we at risk of losing them at lease expiry?

But I think there is a broader commercial question: what, if anything, is your reputation preventing you from charging, leasing or becoming in the first place?

Could stronger customer experience support higher rents or service charge acceptance? Could it make an occupier more likely to expand within your portfolio, recommend one of your buildings to another business, or choose another asset you own?Could your reputation make leasing conversations easier before a prospective occupier has even toured the building?

The opposite is also true. There may be prospective occupiers who like the building, location and specification but have heard that management is difficult, communication is poor or problems take too long to resolve. They may simply choose somewhere else.

An occupier isn't only choosing a building. They're choosing the landlord and management team they're going to have to deal with for the next five or ten years. The reputation of the people behind the building therefore becomes part of the product itself.

Real estate businesses absolutely do have reputations

I was reminded of this recently when the name of a particular property company came up in conversation. Before anyone mentioned the quality of its buildings or locations, somebody immediately said, “I wouldn't want to be their tenant.” They then pulled out their phone and showed us some recent news coverage.

I'm deliberately not going to name the company, and I'm not making any judgement about whether the coverage was fair - that's almost beside the point. Once a reputation like that exists in the market, it becomes part of the customer proposition whether the business intends it to or not.

That's the real estate equivalent of people telling me they love Lauryn Hill but wouldn't buy a ticket. You can own a great building in a great location and still have potential customers deciding that dealing with you isn't worth it.

So, what are your real estate customers saying about you?

If you want to know what your customers are actually saying about you, that's what we do at RealService. We help real estate owners, investors and property managers understand how their customers experience their buildings and services, what is working, what isn't, and what might be quietly damaging their reputation.

Through independent customer interviews, surveys, mystery shopping and benchmarking, we uncover the things your customers may not be saying directly to you. If you'd like to understand what your customers really think, get in touch.

To learn more, visit: https://www.real-service.com/ or drop me a DM.

For more insights like this follow me Chenai Gondo, PhD