Coastal Housing Group
Coastal Housing has a saying: ‘kina’ole’, from the beautiful Hawaiian language. It means ‘doing the right thing, in the right way, at the right time, in the right place, to the right person, for the right reason, with the right feeling, the first time’.
MRI Tenancy Analytics helps Coastal Housing Group to deliver on this mission.
Background
With over 5,000 tenants in South Wales, Coastal Housing Group’s purpose is to sustain tenancies, communities and the local economy. Coastal was formed in 2008 after a merger between Swansea Housing Association (formed 1978) and Dewi Sant Housing Association (formed 1991) with the objective of regenerating older stock and building new houses to improve the local community and provide good quality affordable homes.
At a glance
2018/19 performance
Stock: 6,000 homes
Turnover: £33.7m
Employees: 240
New homes: £16m
Arrears: 5.6%
Needs analysis
Director of Homes, Communities and Services, Serena Jones, invested in MRI Tenancy Analytics after recognising that it would allow them to gain an understanding, in real time, of its customers’ wider lives, enabling the organisation to design and deliver truly tailored services. In the context of extensive welfare reform, including the introduction of Universal Credit and its associated financial challenges, Tenancy Analytics identifies which tenants are most likely to struggle, which doors to knock on. As well as ensuring personalised support for Coastal’s customers, the Tenancy Analytics solution would also protect the company’s income.
“Tenancy Analytics equips us to proactively support tenants, ensuring we use evidence not opinion in our work. The savings are obvious. Our staff access the data immediately and proactively and then have informed one-to-one contact with tenants. The alternative is manually acquiring and scoring public records and then, typically, it would only be in our second or third visit with a tenant that we might fully understand their financial situation. With Tenancy Analytics, we turn up the first visit with the information at our fingertips. That is significant in terms of resources, both time and money.”
Outcomes
As well as driving efficiency, the solution itself proved to be incredibly user-friendly. Serena was most impressed by the design:
“It’s fresh and simple, very well designed and accessible. The analytics through the Venn diagrams are excellent.”
Serena and her team saw the portability of Tenancy Analytics as a huge plus – enabling access online from anywhere and supporting agile working. Tenancy Analytics’s accessible areas can also be tailored to individual staff roles on a ‘need to know’ basis. Another valuable feature was the constant data update, making changes quickly visible.
With several Coastal Housing Group projects currently ongoing, including one to move low-risk tenants onto Direct Debit payments, Tenancy Analytics is being embedded into the day-to-day operations of the company’s Housing Officers.
Serena says that using Tenancy Analytics and the data it generates means the company “can wrap the right services around individuals at the right time”.
