PhD Dissertation Final Oral Defense (May 2024)

Title of dissertation: THE IMPACT OF POOR COMMUNICATION DURING THE PANDEMIC SITUATION WITHIN THE UAE REAL ESTATE SECTOR
Name of Candidate: Mohammed Al Ustad
Name of Supervisor: Dr. Vian Ahmed
Program: PhD in Engineering - Engineering Systems Management

Abstract
Real estate plays a vital role in every aspect of the global economy. All businesses, such as shops, offices, factories, etc., depend on real estate. In addition, real estate is a fundamental source of employment and economic growth. However, because real estate is a complex industry, one of the core problems comes from its communication environment. Many communication lines come from many stakeholders involved in a particular project in the real estate industry. In addition, despite the literature listing numerous studies and credible scales that have been proposed over the years with information linking poor communication in construction projects, they frequently focus only on the project team and the execution stage in the third phase of the project life cycle. Moreover, there was little or no information about real estate project failure between the stakeholders, and there were no defined factors of poor communication in each stage of the real estate industry's project life cycle during the pandemic. In addition, there is minimal research regarding poor communication in real estate industries and underpinning factors that occur in the project life cycle stages. No decision support tool was developed to aid project management in identifying the poor communication in the project life cycle stages in the UAE real estate industry, which indicates the research gap. Accordingly, this study uses a mixed-methods approach to identify and validate the underlying causes of poor communication in the real estate industry. It does so by using semi-structured interviews, survey questionnaires, and case studies. The study uses confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to identify the key factors that significantly impact poor communication in real estate projects. Additionally, the key decision factors found in the literature, added with the addition from the interview incorporated into CFA, were incorporated into the decision support tool based on the decision tree risk factor. The DST highlights where poor communication occurs between the stakeholders in the stages of the project life cycle, which will protect the project from any failure due to time and cost overruns supported by the risk matrix. Lastly, the study creates an application platform that will be adopted by project management in the real estate industry to test poor communication in each stage of the project life cycle in UAE during the pandemic situation.

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