ANALYTICAL HIERARCHY PROCESS: EXPERTS' JUDGEMENTS ON GRADE 'A' OFFICE BUILDING QUALITY

Abstract

Traditionally, image driven office occupiers such as banking and financial companies have occupied large office spaces in the Singapore’s Central Business District (CBD), particularly in premium investment grade offices, termed as Grade A office buildings. These properties are prestigious buildings occupying prime locations in the CBD, with modern and high quality finishing and good building specifications among other important property attributes. As such, this study seeks to extract experts’ judgements about their opinions on the relative importance of 30 property attributes in contributing to Grade A office building quality. Using the analytical hierarchy process of pairwise comparisons, expert inputs are analysed and ranked according to weights given to each property attribute, producing a list of relative importance for the 30 sub-factors. Empirical results reveal that functionality, with a weightage of 30.7%, plays the most important role in affecting building quality, followed by presentation (18.42%) and amenities (13.93%). With this knowledge, building owners and designers can seek to improve tenants’ satisfaction by incorporating these preferences as early as the design stage. A key finding is the new-found importance assigned to amenities, previously ranked to be of mid-low importance but now deemed as an important attribute. The explanations accounting for this phenomenon include a rise in users’ expectations of how a building should function, the way businesses are conducted and the use of amenities to ease work life stress. Comparisons made with other similar studies also reveal that different market contexts produce different sets of results, which may be largely explained by timing issues, differences in geographical contexts, and local culture and lifestyles.