The RealService story so far... 1993 to 2004
The origins of RealService can be traced back to a ‘light bulb’ moment at a New York property seminar in 1993.
On the stage was Mike Lipsey, a specialist consultant in improving customer satisfaction in the US real estate industry. In the audience was Howard Morgan, a director at the time of BAA Lynton, the property arm of airport operator BAA plc.
Howard recalls: “Mike was running a programme about how to provide better customer service and retain your customers. Half way through he said ‘you have to realise you are not in the bricks and mortar business – you are operating in the hospitality sector’.
“The realisation that if you see property as a service industry rather than just bricks and mortar business then you will be more successful, was as if all the lights had suddenly been switched on.”
On his return to the UK, Howard put his new-found focus into practice, setting up BAA plc’s ‘Property Challenge’ programme. The award-winning strategy was to grow the company’s commercial property business across BAA’s seven airports by treating tenants as valued customers. It was a strategy that worked, resulting in a dramatic growth in business and endorsement from BAA’s regulator.
In 1999 redundancy from BAA, combined with an impassioned belief in the value of customer service, inspired Howard to team up with Mike Lipsey (who had been a consultant for BAA), and US benchmarking specialists, Kingsley Associates, to form a joint venture in the UK - Kingsley Lipsey Morgan, or RealService as it is known today.
Howard says: “We set off to create a specialist consulting business with a vision to persuade and inspire the UK real estate industry to adopt customer service strategies.”
The company’s core business then, which remains today, is conducting in-depth occupier satisfaction studies across the retail, industrial, office, residential
and rural sectors.
One of the company’s first clients was Dorrington, who have been a client of the company ever since. Another very long-standing client is SEGRO (formerly Slough Estates). A few years later Land Securities (the UK’s biggest property company) came on board and made “customer service” one of its five core values. Other well known names include British Land, The Portman Estate, The Crown Estate, Grosvenor
and Marchday Group.