Busting repairs bottlenecks is key to better housing services
Kay Aston is Head of Product for NEC Housing. She explains why disrepair is such a major challenge for landlords and how making faults easier for tenants to report is vital to a faster fix.
Small issues can create big problems
No home is immune to annoying faults. Whether you’re an owner or a renter, it’s likely you’ll be dealing with sticking locks, dripping taps and flickering lights at least. The unluckier among us get the leaking roofs and the boiler meltdowns. Think about fixing all of those things across 50,000 homes and you get a sense of what social landlords are dealing with.
Even if every fault could be fixed on the first visit (which is pretty much impossible), it’s a huge volume of work. Add in the complexity of managing it all safely, cost-effectively and in full compliance with the regulations, and the scale of the challenge becomes clear.
It starts with the right diagnosis
Reducing unnecessary visits makes a massive difference because it frees up skilled teams to complete other jobs faster. For that, you need to know what you’re dealing with. Because the more you know, the better you can plan your response to avoid a more costly issue down the line.
For example, reports of ‘a leak’ will trigger a plumber. But if this leak is also near to electrical equipment or streaming down walls it’s likely to need an electrician, a plasterer and a decorator to fix the damage. That could be multiple companies, different materials and lots of appointments to schedule around tenants’ busy lives.
Making it easier for people to report the type and extent of a problem simply, accurately and quickly can all help landlords to plan more effectively. If this means more requests initially, that’s good, because it’s heading off potentially bigger problems and building trust with tenants that repairs requests will be acted on.
Automation drives improvement
Things can get particularly complicated when repairs involve more than one trade. There may be a lack of coordination between different companies and a lack of data too. The tiler arriving to complete a refitted bathroom, for example, may not know that the plumber had trouble getting access the day before and there are now knock-on delays. Being able to track and coordinate repairs all the way from request to completion is vital to working efficiently, and that includes alerting tenants at the right time.
Better communication increases satisfaction
Residents are far more likely to rate their housing provider highly in satisfaction surveys if their repairs are fixed on the first visit, with no need for repeat appointments, and they’ve been kept informed of progress along the way. We’ve all experienced the frustration of staying in for an appointment but having no one arrive.
Better communication is equally important for tradespeople too. The team sent to fix a broken roof should know if there’s a young child or a dangerous dog on the property so they can keep access points, like garden gates, secured for everyone’s safety. But they should be able to see this information easily – for example on a mobile app – before they arrive so it doesn’t impact their productivity.
Keeping ahead of disrepair
With tough new regulations around safety and satisfaction, improving repairs performance is likely to remain one of the biggest challenges for social landlords. But making things easier for tenants, tradespeople and housing managers is a very good place to start.
