How to turn around your repairs service

Social Landlords – Who knows more about your homes?

Last week I asked my LinkedIn followers to give their view, and about 3/4 said the tenants, 15% said the front line or call centre staff with just 8% thinking the maintenance contractors knew the most. No one felt the Board or senior team knew what was going on.

Personally, I am sure the people who know most about your homes will be your tenants, closely followed by your contractors. The first group live in “your”/their homes and contractors go into these homes about four times a year.

Of course, if you send your front line staff or surveyors out and you have quite a lot of standard stock this group may have a fairly good idea. But I would suggest on the whole the people who take requests from tenants via the phone or through emails haven’t got a clue about the homes that they are discussing. They don’t know enough about the specific home to advise the tenant where the stopcock is, or how the windows can be fixed. The people ordering the repairs in your organisation generally work in the dark, ordering standard repairs for standard problems, although they certainly know more than your board or senior team.

The wisest LinkedIn commentators correctly mentioned that the knowledge everyone has should be pooled in order to understand the issues, and here I would wholeheartedly agree.

Even if you do a survey of your homes every decade it still needs input from the people who live there, as the home has to fit their needs just as your trousers need to fit you. Tenants with small children, with physical disabilities or terminal illnesses, families who are overcrowded or people living alone will have different needs and relationships with their homes. On top of this, there are personal preferences to consider, like having a shower rather than a bath. Your tenants know a lot. How much it costs to heat the home, how often the lift breaks down, how the rubbish disposal systems works, if there is an issue with ASB, if there are regular fire safety drills, if the grass is cut or the corridors cleaned frequently or not. You cannot rely on your contractors or your call centre team to tell you this.

Equally important is how much your contractors know about your homes. They will be keeping records of what work they did and when, plus information on boiler brand and model, and what has been renewed etc. But again – do you have access to their records? Do they share what they find with you? They do not.

In addition to ignoring (or not trusting) tenants and contractors, there are the internal teams that know specific but important things like fire, gas or asset management teams.

This dispersed data, and the lack of collaboration and trust causes a huge, expensive, intractable problem. Associations are wasting so much time and money, and tenants are fed up and disappointed. Contractors never feel like valued partners in improving your stock, but people employed to carry out disparate and random “jobs”. Housing associations, without a clear picture of their properties’ repair histories and current conditions, are prone to repeat the same fixes or pay for solutions that don’t address the root problem.

Is there a solution to the number one problem facing housing associations today? Yes.

1. We need a shared understanding of the issues – tenants, landlords and contractors must work together on their objectives and solutions. The visions need to be aligned and agreed, like making homes better over an agreed time frame.
2. The basic asset management database needs to accessible to all ie. the contractor, resident, front line staff and specialist teams. The data needs to be current and accurate. Data is the backbone of effective property management. With a simple, common database of social property assets this would enable each associations to address this unfortunate deficiency.
3. The data needs to be available in real time, so it can guide precise, rational decision making, like what repairs are actually needed to resolve the problem affecting the tenant. You cannot make this decision without having access to what the tenant, contractor and surveyors know about the condition and history of work to the property.
4. All parties must update the data as work is carried out to ensure the data is common, up to date and accurate
5. With new, detailed knowledge about the properties, Housing Associations can maximise the potential of their assets. Whether it’s energy efficiency improvements, space optimisation, or compliance upgrades, good data is critical to making informed investments that enhance property value and resident quality of life.

It is imperative for Housing Associations to recognise the importance of robust data management. Investing in modern data systems, fostering a culture of data sharing with contractors, and continuously updating data practices.