The state of value creation in the real-estate sector–lessons from lean thinking

Purpose
– Although great emphasis has been given to the added value of real estate, the current studies miss the phase when the actual value is created, i.e., the production phase of real-estate services. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to evaluate the current state of value creation of the commercial real-estate services from a lean thinking perspective.

Design/methodology/approach
– Value creation is studied in four Finnish cases through 122 interviews and eight workshops.

Findings
– Cross-case analysis identified six sources of waste resulting as poor value creation: sub-process optimisation instead of optimising the entire process, the price minimisation instead of cost minimisation, difficulties responding to customer value, overloaded employees, inability to make improvements, and poorly managed information.

Research limitations/implications
– Although the findings are grounded on a solid data collection and analysis, the case study nature of the research and the Finnish case study settings create limitations for the generalisation of the findings.

Practical implications
– Service providers and other process owners can use the findings to improve their value creation and increase the productivity of their service processes.

Originality/value –
This is one of the first research studies that utilise lean thinking in commercial service processes in the real-estate sector and thus provides new insight into how to increase productivity through waste minimisation.