SERVICE APARTMENT INDUSTRY : A COMPREHENSIVE REPORT

Abstract

With regionalism and globalisation, people are becoming more mobile for several reasons especially for work purposes. The number of expatriates and business travellers are on the rise in Singapore over the years and this has a direct impact on the service apartment industry. In the dynamic business market of today, there is always fierce competition in every industry. Service apartment operators are no exception. They have to be more creative and aggressive in their marketing aspects in order to remain competitive. Being a service oriented industry, operators have to be very attentive to their customers' needs too. This dissertation aims to provide a study on the user's preferences of service apartments and their housing budget so as to identify contributing factors to the attractiveness of service apartments thereby enables operators to cater better to the needs of users in future and have a more effective marketing measures. Both quantitative and qualitative research methods are adopted in this study. A survey is conducted with the tenants of the various service apartments and interviews with managers of service apartments as well. Descriptive statistics and Chi-square tests are used to analysed the research findings. Some of the implications from the research findings include marketing to the multinational companies in the industry with a large proportion of expatriates, internet, property agents and newspapers are the most popular choice among the expatriates to search for an accommodation and also how to cater to the needs of the tenants better.