A Housing Forum Good Practice Guide 10 Sustainable Leasehold and Long-term Asset Management In order to reach the best conclusions, housing associations need to decide the following: l What is the strategic direction of our organisation? l Do we have the structure to be able to manage activities that are more of a commercial nature? l Do we have the skills to manage the range of tenure types? l Where do we want to own property? Are the current areas of operation right for our future strategy? l What standard of property condition do we wish to offer? Are we aiming for Decent Homes Standard, for example, or do we aspire to offer more than that? How can we respond to future pressures to improve property condition? l Is the property mix correct for the foreseeable future? l What balance do we wish to achieve between offering social rents, affordable rents, sub market rents and full market rents? Are there affordability issues with any of the current stock, perhaps as a result of the current programme of welfare reform? l How satisfied are residents with the property they are currently living in? And do we have the information available to interrogate this meaningfully? Specifically, does resident satisfaction information allow us to determine that residents are more satisfied with certain types, ages or locations of property? l What are the cost estimates of work required to bring stock up to the Decent Homes Standard in future? Or the costs to go beyond this, if that is the aspiration of the housing association? l If the property is sold, do we want to and can we replace it? Do we have a pipeline of development and/or acquisition? Will it be in the same geographical location or out of area? l If redevelopment is a consideration, will planning issues halt our plans and send us back to the drawing board? l Are there title restrictions, covenants, loan or transfer issues (which should be captured in the asset and liability registers which housing associations should hold) that need to be considered? Since the Decent Homes Standard was introduced there have been no new mandatory performance standards that housing associations must meet to improve the condition and amenities of their existing stock, so in one sense they are under less pressure to do so than when the Decent Homes Standard was introduced. In addition, the financial pressures on housing associations from rent cuts and welfare reforms make justifying investments in existing stock more difficult. However, at the same time, there is a continuing need to ensure that housing association stock continues to meet contemporary expectations, and to remember that residents’ expectations are likely to change over time. One more factor to bear in mind is that there is a new generation of residents more equipped to use social and digital media and who perhaps expect to have a different relationship with their landlord. There is no getting away from the fact that to identify the best performing assets, you need to hold data on each and every one of the assets. Calculating the property viability assessment of each of its properties is really the only way a housing association can accurately assess the return on assets expected to be assessed as part of the regulator’s valuefor-money (VFM) standard.
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