How should technology companies approach HAs?

One of the great privileges of running a large company is that you meet people who are dying to show you something they have designed or invented to make your business better.

The most memorable of these was being shown a robotic window cleaner. Although the founders could authoritatively tell us how much build-to-rent providers, Councils and Housing Associations were spending on cleaning their windows, and how they could do it for less, in reality they had created something no one in their right mind would actually use. Any residential operator knows that even if it could be proved that a huge robot could manoeuvre around the city and clean tower block windows reliably and safely, it would not be worth changing how they operate. Window cleaning is not on the “keeps me awake at night” list of operator worries. A build to rent landlord, for example, will be interested in bringing in the rents, letting homes quickly and getting repairs fixed fast and economically. Gimmicks don’t cut it.

I have seen quite a few gimmicks in my time, convincing me that many companies offering technology solutions have no idea what the customer (i.e. the business they are pitching to) wants, or they present a product that merely addresses an incidental or insignificant need. I have met dozens of over-excited founders who neglected Rule Number One: Understand what your customer fundamentally needs. Many new technology companies produce pitch decks and IMs displaying their market intelligence alongside competitor analysis with extrapolated sales trajectories. They are enthusiastic and committed with a catchy name and logo and a nice, mocked up demo, But the meeting can be slightly embarrassing when we have to reveal they misunderstood our business and haven’t addressed our pain points.

Exceptional tech companies like Amazon, Microsoft or Apple have succeeded by relentlessly listening to the customer (who in most cases are an individual consumer rather than a business, so insight is much more directly and easily observed). However when they turn their attention to businesses (such as Housing Associations or councils) they don’t seem so well informed or as able to offer sensible solutions. Their sales meetings usually promote what their technology can do rather than the operational needs of the businesses that procure technology. Even the best suppliers like Microsoft, Google and AWS, with their huge resources, have a problem in listening attentively to their business customers, offering lots of expensive “nice to have” bells and whistles that are not needed and seldom used.  

Anyone running a rented housing operation, or any business, will describe their pain points, headaches, problems and anxieties. These are the things that cost too much, are too complicated, take too long or which threaten the well-being of the business. This is where technology can score big by disrupting a current way of working and making it better, faster and more profitable. But even so ,this is not the end of the story. Introducing new technology involves significant additional cost – changing processes and people’s behaviour, implementing new systems and integrating them with the existing systems, as well as reputational and deployment risks. Change is not done lightly, and many technology companies are surprisingly ignorant of this, or vastly underestimate its time and cost.

In short, there is a yawning gap between what founders, inventors, technologists design and create and what the built environment industry needs. Suppliers often get bogged down in what the technology can do rather than the operational needs of the businesses that procure technology.

I ran a large housing association for nearly 20 years and had a very unsatisfactory relationship with existing technology suppliers. After leaving NHG I carried out a piece of research on the technology needs of the sector, elaborated in a short pamphlet Social Housing: Radical reform through better collaboration, interdependent work and technological innovation. While the research proposed some cultural and organisational changes within the sector, it focused on the technology needs of housing associations.

In summary, I believe the sector must became a stronger client. Because so few tech companies actually “get” our purpose or process, it is vital that housing associations collaborate to effectively tell providers what they want and need. The patient, but creative, work of specification is vital if the sector is to effectively express their common needs and issues. In my paper I summarised the issues that matter to housing associations as:

• live, clean, reliable data, especially about our homes
• summary information on each home and its history to be available during a call or visit
• property information to be shared between resident, landlord and contractor
• a commitment to open data and transparency
• support for data-based decision making, using live, reliable data