The Housing Technology team often talks to people who’ve just joined the social housing sector, typically from the commercial sector, either with a housing provider or with an IT/business provider focused on social housing.
In every instance, the one thing we always emphasise to them is the lack of competition between housing providers and therefore our sector’s almost-unique ability to openly share what we’re doing with each other.
Can you imagine Ford and Volkswagen, Waitrose and Tesco or Netflix and Amazon would ever willingly share their successes and failures with their peers? Or call or meet up to pick each other’s brains about how best to deploy, say, IoT devices, which CRM software to implement, how to make digital transformation ‘stick’ or the staffing nuances of adopting AI?
Housing providers can do all those things and more, yet we believe this ability for housing providers to share their successes, failures and the pitfalls along the way isn’t recognised widely enough and is woefully under-used.
Collaboration and sharing (as distinct from lecturing or telling) is our sector’s superpower – use it widely as well as wisely.
To give an example very close to home (surprise, surprise…), Housing Technology’s annual conference and executive forum in March is wholly predicated on getting the social housing sector together for a couple of days to share what’s worked, what’s not worked and perhaps how to do things differently next time.
Whether that sharing and collaboration is via ‘warts and all’ presentations, workshops with peers, informal networking, evening drinks or technology demos is entirely up to you (and your team).
If any of that sounds appealing, perhaps please consider joining us and your peers at Housing Technology 2026 (full details & tickets available from conference.housing-technology.com), and we hope to see you there.
