Four and a Half Out of Ten
What the residential industry says about itself when nobody is watching
Two rounds of survey work with senior people in residential property. They scored their own industry at 4.5 out of 10 on customer experience. Not one gave a nine or a ten. And when asked at what stage of the development lifecycle customer experience is actively considered, handover scored zero per cent. So did post-move-in.
What Hospitality Has Always Known
And residential property is still learning
Seventy-five per cent of the room named hospitality as the industry that does customer experience brilliantly. Not because hotels are simpler, but because they made a structural decision residential has not: that the experience is a product in its own right, not a byproduct of the thing being sold.
AI can predict. It cannot care.
What technology does well in customer experience, and where it stops
AI is genuinely useful: predictive maintenance, defect pattern recognition across multi-phase schemes. What it cannot do is hear the frustration in a call about heating that has failed three times in six weeks. The developers who win on experience will not be the ones who automate most. They will be the ones who use technology to make their people more effective.
825,000 New Homes. One Decade.
How can quality and experience keep pace?
Knight Frank puts Saudi Arabia's requirement at around 825,000 new homes by 2030, more than 115,000 a year. Homeownership has gone from 47% in 2016 to 65.4% in 2024. Delivery at scale and experience at scale are two different disciplines, and the second one is not yet getting the same structural attention.
The Hidden Cost of Poor Customer Experience
Why this is a financial problem, not a reputational one
Remedial works after handover. Customer care overhead. New Homes Ombudsman awards up to £50,000 for homes reserved from January 2024. Bain's work shows a 5% increase in retention lifts profit by 25% to 95%. The cost of good customer experience is fixed and predictable. The cost of poor customer experience is variable and always higher than expected.
The Snagging Crisis
Why quality assurance is a commercial imperative
The Home Builders Federation found in March 2025 that 93.7% of new build buyers reported problems after moving in, and more than a quarter reported over fifteen. The question is not whether defects happen. It is who finds them, when, and who pays.
