As Mobysoft’s 100th customer for its RentSense software, BPHA has reported on its experience of managing its caseloads and level of arrears.
Helena Pountney, regional housing manager, BPHA, said, “The main driver for buying RentSense wasn’t about reducing arrears per se, but about creating more capacity within our housing team. Our officers are generic in terms of their responsibilities and before RentSense, they were reviewing their caseload in our housing management systems, and the problem was their caseloads, not accuracy.
“RentSense is intelligent and highlights only the cases we need to action, so our housing officers can spend time addressing the right cases. At first, the big surprise was the number of missed cases that RentSense found, and this really helped to focus the team. And for us, it was originally a question of investing in additional staff resources or investing in RentSense, but it’s far more efficient to focus on the right cases and give officers more time, and that’s what RentSense enables us to do.
“For example, since our deployment of RentSense, the number of properties we manage has increased by 1,000 yet we’ve only needed to hire one extra housing officer to manage this growth. With the right cases, our team has been able to focus on the right tenants and offer the right support. As a result, arrears have fallen from 2.9 per cent to 2.5 per cent in the past two years. And when universal credit was first introduced, we used RentSense to create separate UC patches for officers, but we now see UC as business as usual and our team simply has their UC and non-UC cases amalgamated.
“RentSense helps by providing an accurate, pre-prioritised workload. This really helps free up time for the officers so they can focus on other aspects of their roles. The intelligence of the system also means that when they have their arrears action days, they can highlight specific types of cases to work through.
“RentSense has not only helped to create around 2.4 FTE of capacity within the housing team, but also lower our arrears, despite having added an extra 1,000 homes to our housing portfolio.”
