IT Support for Housing Associations

Housing Management Systems are the heart of housing associations and trusts’ IT and data control.

Finding the right IT company that can deploy expertise and experience needs to be an organisation that understands how pivotal it is to your work.

Obstacles to the social housing sector

The housing sector and particularly housing associations are up against widescale challenges and obstacles in delivering quality housing and services to tenants.

Politically, socially and environmentally, it’s a difficult territory to navigate with there being too few houses available in the private sector and even more so in the social sector.

In the UK, research suggests around 4 million households with a low income or in need of financial support receive housing from more than 1,600 social housing providers.

(Housing-technology.com, 2022)

These challenges include:

• Demand far outweighs the supply available

• Cost of living crisis

• Lack of technical understanding or access from tenants

• A heightened pressure to deliver using government funding

• Associations merging leading to varying systems and processes

• Reducing budgets

Associations struggling with the lack of housing available versus dwellings available, the pressures to succeed with tax-funded but ever-reducing budgets and often merging more minor associations have led to high-pressure projects and deliverables.

This often means that improving ICT or a digital transformation can feel widely optimistic and unrealistic for housing associations in the public sector. Developing technology capabilities and creating scale through business intelligence and better use of business insights seems like an impossible challenge.

For tenants, the cost of living crisis and a recession has pushed demand even further, with interest rates making existing mortgages or rent unaffordable and plans to purchase no longer achievable.

Other people are facing redundancies and are unable to support their families and pay their bills on a single salary or may already have been in single-earner households.

This has created a surge of people having to turn to their local housing association for support.

More than 96% of social housing is provided by local authorities or not-for-profit private organisations.

The importance and responsibility of these groups are enormous and choosing where to invest can be difficult and need a long list of sign off.

However, research suggests for every £1 invested in housing support, almost £2 is returned through avoiding costs to public services such as social care, health and crime.

(The Health Foundation, 2017)

Other benefits include:

• A more efficient organisation

• Set a good example and develop a better tenant experience

• Job satisfaction for housing association employees