Title:Real estate agent's balance between work and private life, A qualitative study on how today's digital technology can affect real estate brokers' balance between work and private life

Level:Thesis for Bachelor’s Degree in Business and Administration, Spring semester 2019

Author(s):Matilda Freme, Frida Hernudd

Supervisors:Agneta Sundström & Kristina Mickelsson

Aim:The purpose is to gain an increased understanding of how digitization affects individuals within sales organizations and their ability to balance their time for work and private life.

Method:The study has used a qualitative method. Data collection has taken place through ten semi-structured interviews whose selection is real estate brokers in the Stockholm region.

Result & Conclusion:Results show that digital technology leads to imbalances with real estate agents, but in some respects it has to do with the profession itself and the norm of what the professional role should and should meet with its customers. Result also shows that digital technology often facilitates the work of real estate agents, but that privacy associated with increased flexibility leads to a more limited privacy. Furthermore, we found that some real estate agents were better and others worse to deal with the imbalance that exists between work and private life.

Contributions:The result that our study has shown is that real estate agents, who work on a commission-based salary, experience an imbalance between work and private life. The imbalance is based on a combination of the profession's in itself and how digitalization has led to increased flexibility and thus increased accessibility. This can give other commission-based organizations an insight into - on the one hand - how well sustainable the profession and this salary set are, and on the other hand how digitalization should be managed so as not to allow, for example, accessibility to increase. Theories and arguments about digitization and its impact within a commission-based organisation do not seem to exist. This also creates the essay's contribution and the fulfillment of our research gap. Our study thus contributes to an increased understanding of the balance between work and private life within commission-based professions and how this is affected by digitization such as smartphones and computers.

Suggestion for future research: Examine a commission-based profession, but with a different professional role, for example in Telecom companies. This is to be able to see how the impact of digitization acts in this context and if there exists any imbalance within this professional role. Second suggestion:  examine real estate agents, who work based on fixed salary, and whether they experience the same stress on accessibility and whether they experience imbalance between work and private life with digitalisation. Thirdly: examine if different types of personality in real estate agents also mean different degrees of work-life balance. 

Key words: Work, privacy, digitization, real estate broker, balance, imbalance, boundary drawing