My journey into social housing didn’t start in an office. It began in my own building during the pandemic. Spiralling service charges, rising crime and limited access to services were affecting my local community, so I set up a shared email address and sent out a Zoom link, and our residents’ association was born. Soon, I found myself meeting MPs, the neighbourhood police and property managers to represent my neighbours.
We didn’t just talk, we made things happen. We secured small but significant changes that made our lives better, from tackling maintenance delays to improving communications between residents and management.
A few years later, I now work in housing data. My experience during the pandemic taught me that when communities have the right tools, knowledge and information, they can change outcomes for themselves and for others.
The same principles apply to organisations: when data is available, accessible and easy to understand, it empowers better decisions and stronger services.
Leaping the barriers to better data for all
At a recent Housing Technology event, we discussed our sector’s biggest data challenges, and regardless of organisational size or technology stack, the same themes came up again and again:
- Competing priorities – Data often slips down the agenda when immediate operational needs take over.
- Limited capacity – Internal teams are stretched, making it hard to keep pace with new technologies.
- Scaling gaps – Software built for business sectors with large budgets don’t always translate into housing.
These issues aren’t just technical. They slow down innovation, limit what teams can achieve and in many cases affect tenants’ quality of service.
For smaller housing providers, building an enterprise-scale platform isn’t realistic. For larger ones, it is possible, but success depends on breaking the work into manageable steps that deliver early wins, rather than multi-year ‘big bang’ projects.
This is where my personal perspective from the residents’ association comes back: people engage more when they can see progress quickly, whether that’s a fixed lift or a working dashboard. That’s why in recent years there has been growing interest in breaking large programmes into smaller, faster-moving projects, so that progress is visible from the start.
Why we need a different approach
What about housing providers doing brilliant, ‘people first’ work but without big budgets or specialist teams? Increasingly, the housing sector is looking for ready-to-use, fully-managed solutions. These remove the heavy lifting and let housing providers focus on service delivery rather than infrastructure management.
Across all sectors, we’re seeing more accessible tools. AI-driven search, cloud-native governance and instant dashboards are no longer the exclusive preserve of large corporates. The challenge is making sure these innovations are implemented in ways that work for the reality of social housing and its people.
One example of adapting technology from other sectors comes from The Dot Collective’s acquisition of The Data Refinery, a platform originally developed for areas such as e-commerce and sports. This illustrates how one can lower the barriers to entry, speed up delivery and make advanced data capabilities available to a wider range of housing providers.
Borrow, adapt & apply…
One housing provider I spoke to recently wanted to improve its regulatory reporting without building a team of in-house data specialists at a cost of hundreds of thousands per year. By adopting a flexible, cloud-based platform originally developed for a different sector, they were up and running in weeks rather than months, allowing them to redirect time and resources to frontline services while improving governance and compliance.
This highlights an important shift; our sector doesn’t just need technology, it needs adaptable technology. Platforms that can cross industry boundaries, scale to the size of the organisation and be maintained without an army of specialists.
Where do we go next?
Housing data should be a common good. It should benefit the entire sector, not just the organisations with the deepest pockets. Behind every dataset are people, homes and communities whose lives could be improved if we could see more clearly and act faster.
This means thinking differently about ownership and access. It means moving away from siloed, bespoke systems and towards approaches that share infrastructure and insights so that progress made by one organisation can benefit many. Innovation isn’t just about tools, but about collaboration, shared learning and a willingness to rethink the status quo.
I’ve seen first-hand, both as a resident and as someone working in housing data, that the more we share, the more we learn and the more enduring change we can create.
My experience has shown that the housing sector’s spirit of knowledge-sharing is strong but to truly move the dial, we must look beyond our own walls, borrowing proven ideas from other business sectors, blending them with our own innovations, and building shared solutions that lift the whole community together.
Kaz Sahota is the head of commercial software and support at The Dot Collective.
