Together Housing has just completed a successful end to its 2019/20 financial year by beating its annual arrears target and reducing evictions by 39 per cent, citing its use of Mobysoft’s RentSense software as a key reason for its success.
Jackie Tagg, income manager, Together Housing, said, “We achieved and exceeded our year-end performance targets for 2019/20. This was our third year as a single organisation after amalgamating five housing providers. During that time, we’ve improved our income management processes to promote better processes consistently across all of our operations, which we couldn’t have done without RentSense.
“Evictions have been cut by 39 per cent this year; early interventions and the consistent approach enabled by RentSense has helped the team sustain more tenancies.”
Before the coronavirus outbreak, many of Together Housing’s staff worked from home up to three days each week so were able to hit the ground running at the start of the lockdown.
Tagg said, “With RentSense, it’s easy for our income team to log on and work from home, plus I can manage the team remotely because I can see how they are performing. What RentSense has really helped enable since the switch to working from home full time is the ability to divide the workload as each week progresses; particularly since the outbreak of coronavirus, we have seen a 30 per cent increase in our income officers’ caseloads.”
During the first week of lockdown, Together Housing’s team was very reactive, answering incoming calls from customers. Together has a high percentage of self-payers and many were concerned about paying rent or asking for help regarding universal credit, even though most of the tenants calling in had never had any problems paying their rent in the past.
Tagg said, “We’re well aware that workloads have grown and phone calls are taking longer but RentSense has helped us prioritise caseloads and support those tenants who need assistance, and now we can plan for business as usual.”
