“If you’re just kind, great things can happen,” says Susan Aktemel. Kindness isn’t a trait landlords are famous for, but Aktemel is on a mission to change this with Scotland’s first social enterprise letting agency that specialises in housing people on low incomes or benefits.
Aktemel, an experienced property developer and private landlord, founded Homes for Good in 2013 after cutting ties with a letting agency that had been managing her properties in Glasgow. “We took our portfolio back from them and I made a point of going and visiting all my tenants and finding out who they were,” she says.
One tenant made her realise that she had to take action. “She was two months behind on her rent,” recalls Aktemel. “There was hardly anything in her house, all her stuff was in bin bags, and she said: ‘I thought you were coming to evict me.’”
“That for me was really powerful because the fear that she had, I mean, can you imagine living like that? The letting agent treated her so badly that she didn’t have any concept of her rights, and I just remember thinking that I never want any one of my tenants to feel like that. I said: ‘No, I’m not coming to evict you, let’s just get all your stuff unpacked, and let’s work out where we are and how we can go forward.’ She stayed in the house about another six years.”
This kind of one-to-one care was at the centre of Aktemel’s vision for a dedicated tenancy support service for the most vulnerable people in her local community. She resolved to offer people more than bricks and mortar. “The first full-time person I employed was a social worker,” she says. “Because the human interaction is where you make a difference to people.”
To date, she has secured £13.1m in social investment, and the Homes for Good group now manages around 500 properties – half of which it owns. It works with more than 800 tenants and 180 landlords in and around Glasgow and the west of Scotland. Its latest support has come through a £3m commitment from Big Issue Invest, the social investment arm of The Big Issue, which Aktemel describes as ‘a perfect partner for us’.
‘People need to live somewhere,’ says Aktemel
Homes for Good is the second social enterprise that Aktemel has built, having spent 18 years running a Scottish arts and regeneration charity that she founded. “I knew how you could help people to change their lives if you treated them well,” says Aktemel. “But I didn’t know how to be a letting agent because I’d never been one. It was actually my husband who said to me: ‘Just do it your way.’ And I thought: ‘Well, my way is it needs to feel friendly, it needs to feel like home.’ People need to not feel afraid to talk to us.”
Today, the Homes for Good team is helping tenants with benefit claims, to access mental health services or cookery classes, and with getting back into work. A grant from the national lottery also gives tenants a chance to work with an interior designer.
All this support makes good business sense to Aktemel. “We’ve only evicted one person ever,” she says. “We prefer to work in a human way with people from the outset to avoid problems further down the line.”
In an ideal world, social entrepreneurs wouldn’t have to pick up the slack in a housing crisis, but Aktemel says her tenants can’t wait around for things to change. “If you talk to the Chartered Institute of Housing or Shelter or anybody else, they say the solution is to build more genuinely social housing. They’re absolutely right about that and I completely agree, but in the absence of that happening – for whatever reason – people need to live somewhere.”
Recent victories for renters’ rights mean that other landlords will have to play catch-up sooner than later. In July, a judge at York county court ruled that it was illegal to turn down anyone seeking to rent a property on the ground that they were receiving housing benefit. The case was brought by the charity Shelter on behalf of a single mother with a disability after a letting agent refused to rent to her.
“We’ve got lovely tenants who are in receipt of housing benefit,” says Aktemel, who actively welcomes people claiming any benefits. “The fact that most landlords say no to people on housing benefit means that the only choice such tenants have is at the bottom of the market and it’s really poor quality.”
Homes for Good was awarded £2.4m in national lottery funding in September 2019 to roll out its model across the UK. Aktemel has ambitions to manage 1,000 homes within four years.
Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, Homes for Good has stepped up the support it offers tenants, including helping those who haven’t required it before but who now need to access benefits or mental health support. It has also rolled out a range of tenant engagement activities, including virtual afternoon teas, children’s workshops, film clubs, and the interior design programme.
As for other landlords, Aktemel has this advice. “Landlords get economic benefit out of providing homes, and I think we should never lose sight of the responsibility we have for that. I’ve seen the way that you can help people change if you put time and you put kindness into them.”
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