Whether a property is home to a busy family, a resident with health needs or standing empty between tenancies, it is constantly deteriorating and will need ongoing attention.
The challenge for housing providers is deciding where investment should be prioritised to keep homes in good working order and safe for residents to live in. Across any housing portfolio, those decisions must be made repeatedly and at scale. This is rarely easy.
Housing providers often talk about how the demand for repairs, maintenance and investment outstrips their capacity, particularly when they’re managing large property portfolios across wide geographic areas. With updates to the Decent Homes Standard coming into force, housing providers will need to become much more responsive to ensure their properties are energy efficient, protected from damp and mould and that running costs are affordable for residents.
While the changes coming down the line aren’t a fundamental departure from the status quo, they do raise the bar in areas where housing providers are already under strain. This adds to the pressure on housing staff to have a clear understanding of the condition of their housing assets and make good decisions about where and when to invest to meet higher standards across their stock.
Changing priorities
Decisions on which problems to address first have traditionally been driven by the condition of a property. However, there is now much more emphasis on who is living in it as part of those decisions.
The same problem can carry very different levels of risk depending on residents’ needs. A broken handrail on a staircase may not be urgent in one household, but in a property where residents are older or less mobile, it becomes a much higher priority.
This means housing providers will need to factor household circumstances into their day-to-day decision-making and not just consider the condition of the property itself.
Energy efficiency trade-offs
The growing focus on energy performance in housing adds another layer of complexity as housing providers move towards their net-zero goals.
Technologies such as heat pumps can be more expensive to install than traditional gas boilers, which could limit how many properties can be upgraded each year. Heat pumps might also increase the running costs for some residents, depending on how the heating is used and how well the property is insulated.
What this means for housing providers is that decisions on energy efficiency will need to take much greater account of residents’ individual circumstances and the reality of how homes are lived in, not just how properties perform on paper to cut emissions. In some cases, higher running costs may also influence which rooms residents decide to heat or could lead to radiators being switched on for shorter periods to reduce household costs. This can increase the risk of damp and mould, so residents might need support from their housing provider to help maintain safe and healthy homes.
Insight from data
Housing staff rely on accurate information to make balanced decisions about how properties should be managed.
Stock-condition surveys offer a snapshot of the condition of properties but they are often only carried out over a rolling five-year period so they become out of date quickly as repairs are completed and windows, kitchens or bathrooms are replaced.
Information on the works carried out is often held in separate systems, which means it can take time for staff to build a clear view of a property’s current condition. Systems such as NEC Housing automate much of this process; for example, when a boiler is replaced or a leaky tap is repaired, the property record is immediately updated to give staff access to the most up-to-date information across the entire portfolio.
Viewing information centrally
When asset data is viewed alongside repairs and tenancy information, housing providers get a much clearer picture of what’s really happening across their stock. This makes it easier to identify patterns, such as older terraced properties that are harder to heat or recurrent problems with plumbing or electrics. Housing providers can use these insights to avoid situations where teams are constantly fixing the same problems and focus instead on addressing the underlying causes, reducing the likelihood of these problems happening again.
It’s fairly common for housing providers to maintain separate asset management, repairs and housing systems, so the data isn’t always available at the point when key decisions are being made. But systems that allow data to be recorded and stored in one place improve information sharing across teams. These integrated systems can also improve the overall quality of the data because there’s less chance of re-keying errors and information gaps.
Where it comes together
Meeting higher standards in housing will ultimately come down to the quality of decision-making across the sector.
Housing providers make decisions every day about which properties to prioritise and how to make the best use of their available budgets. Those decisions are becoming more complex as expectations extend beyond the physical condition of homes to how they perform in use and whether they meet the residents’ needs.
Organisations that can bring together information from across assets, repairs and housing management, through digital transformation or a more phased approach, will be better placed to target their investment where it will have the greatest impact on residents and keep homes safer for longer.
David Atkinson is the product lead for asset management at NEC Software Solutions.
