Places for People works in more than 300 different local authorities, managing a porfolio of 60,000 homes in more than 600 neighbourhoods. In a tough financial climate, how can we organise our limited resources to get maximum value from our assets? And how will we know when we're improving the quality of our work for tenants and residents?
Over the past five years we have been developing a neighbourhood assessment strategy to provide an answer to these questions.
The starting point was to identify the areas where our housing stock is concentrated and organise them into neighbourhoods that are meaningful both to our residents and to the business. For us, a neighbourhood is a profit-generating entity. Understanding and influencing income and expenditure at a neighbourhood level has a huge impact in both good and poor performing neighbourhoods.
Profitable neighbourhoods generate high customer satisfaction, as good financial performance comes from fewer residents moving out, leaving fewer empty properties and reducing rent arrears.
The performance of our neighbourhoods is then tracked by tenant satisfaction, turnover, surplus per property and the economic activity levels of our customers. We have introduced this measurement scheme in 29 areas with almost 10,000 homes – and it has seen improvements.
High Hazels, a neighbourhood in the ex-mining village of Huthwaite in the east midlands, suffered high turnover driven mainly by a poor reputation and an underlying anti-social behaviour problem. By better managing the stock in that neighbourhood we saw reduced turnover, shorter re-let times and improved surplus per property.
We worked closely with customers to design a green spaces project that included a secure play area for local children. This led to the creation of a residents group and a new community house, both managed by the community and self-sustaining.
We also looked at Eastbourne's Kingsmere, a multi-landlord estate with a poor reputation. A partnership between the local MP, housing providers and the local authority saw resident satisfaction rise from 58% in 2007 to 97% in 2010.
Working with Sheffield Hallam University, we have measured and evaluated the effects of our neighbourhood investment and found that 85% of residents living in those areas thought their local area had improved. This is a great result. It shows us that by addressing wider neighbourhood issues you can have a positive impact which increases landlord satisfaction ratings and boosts your business.
The drive for improved efficiency and service delivery are a constant challenge. Developing the right diagnostic tools and targeting your work to broader neighbourhood regeneration will mean social landlords and their tenants are able to see their way through the current challenging times and prosper in the future.
Steve Mather is neighbourhoods director at Places for People
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