Risk Perceptions among SME Developers: A Case Study of Thailand’s Real Estate Development Industry

Abstract

Risks may be perceived as a multidimensional probability that impacts different people in different ways. Risks appear in most aspects of everyday life and in every type of business organisation. In the Thai real estate development domain, small and medium enterprise (SMEs) developers lacking appropriate specialist knowledge, competitive strategies and resources often have their projects greater exposed to a variety of risks. This paper aims to examine the SME developers’ perceptions towards risks internally originated within their organisations, and to assess the consequences and likelihood of such risks. In order to successfully achieve this objective, the authors distributed questionnaires to SME developers in the Bangkok Metropolitan Area and analysed the data received from 200 SME respondents to that call. It can be suggested from the results obtained that SMEs consider the following as high impact risks: work not being finished as specified; use of wrong planning strategies; staff corruption or conflicts of interest; lack of financial liquidity; employees lacking appropriate work experience and skills; and project delays. Thus, this paper suggests that SME owners should respond to the aforementioned risks by reducing these key risk factors and/or finding new techniques to control and mitigate them to an acceptable level.