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This study investigates the differences in digitalization tendency levels among young adults (18–30) regarding their living environment, gender, and education.

Digital transformation (DT) refers to digital technologies becoming more prevalent in society. This process transforms lifestyles and business models using information and communication technologies. While digital transformation is on everyone’s agenda worldwide, it is still in its infancy. The data collected from 1,067 young adults show that all three control variables, living environment (CV1), gender (CV2), and education level (CV3), have a significant impact on digitalization tendency. Samples are selected using stratified sampling. Frequency distributions of quantitative data, descriptive statistics, ANOVA analysis, independent sample t-tests, reliability and validity analysis are interpreted in SPSS.

It is concluded from the study that the young adults living in Istanbul are more inclined to use digital technologies and to see the process from the standpoint of its positive results. It is observed that women have a higher digitalization tendency than men. Finally, the tendency to use digital technologies increases with education level, as does the likelihood of perceiving the outputs of these technologies as positive.

The study limited the sample to young adults aged 18–30.

Digitalization tendencies are positively influenced by factors such as living in Istanbul, being a woman, and having a high education level.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-01-2023-0020.

This paper aims to discuss unethical behaviors that small real estate agencies encounter in real estate brokerage practices, the factors that give rise to a trust issue and the potential of legal arrangements for offering a solution. Small real estate agencies, almost the only actor in the real estate brokerage industry until the late twentieth century, still strive to survive despite the globalized market, large corporations increasingly dominating the market, the increasing informality and the real estate portals offering certain brokerage services online. While all these developments put pressure on small real estate agencies, the industry’s unethical behaviors diminish their reliability. Despite the efforts to overcome this issue through legal arrangements, the extent to which these regulations will be successful is still a matter of intense debate.

In total, 85 small real estate agencies operating in Istanbul, Turkey, were posed semi-structured open-ended questions and asked to provide an opinion about the unethical behaviors they face and the potential of a legal arrangement to solve those problems. In the second stage, three focus group interviews were held with representatives from large real estate brokerage companies to make a comparison and they were also posed similar questions. The answers were evaluated using content analysis.

It was found that the unethical behaviors in the real estate industry could mainly be evaluated in two categories, i.e. those stemming from structural problems of the industry and those stemming from problems related to service delivery and that a legal arrangement could only solve the first category.

The research is limited to small real estate agencies that operate in Istanbul, the heart of the Turkish economy and the biggest city of the country where intensive efforts are spent to integrate into the global order.

It is considered that categorization of the causes of problems encountered by the numerous small real estate agencies that struggle to survive in the market and an analysis of the root causes of unethical behaviors in the industry and a discussion on potential solutions that may be brought bylaws will contribute to the literature.