Evaluation and Learning about Social Sustainability in the Real Estate Industry : A Qualitative and Quantitative Study of how Real Estate Companies can Contribute to Society and Profitability

Sammanfattning: Social sustainability is rapidly becoming a more established concept in the real estate industry. Social Sustainability is a vibrant concept that will transform over time in an establishment and can stand for different things. However, the lack of a uniform definition creates challenges for companies on how they should work with and evaluate social sustainability. In this thesis, we aim to specify how real estate companies work with social sustainability and understand the development of social sustainability and how to continue learning. We use a questionnaire analyzed quantitatively using descriptive and inferential statistics and in-depth interviews to achieve the purpose. We find that real estate companies work with social sustainability in different ways. We can conclude that a company’s size and demand will drive the likelihood of working with social sustainability. We also find that companies use evaluation methods that are easy to handle and follow up, such as customer satisfaction indexes. Finally, we found that when it comes to how companies learn, the results from the survey indicate that there is no one way of learning but several. Learning from previous experience is the most used evaluation method, followed by learning from other companies.