Regardless of Covid, lockdowns and national restrictions, people still needed to be able to move home in 2020-21.

The pandemic, together with our move to a national approach to our business, challenged our lettings service to become more flexible than ever before.

Reacting quickly

With teams working remotely, we made more use of technology to help us overcome the challenges of social distancing with around 83% of sign-ups completed virtually and implementing more e-forms to get contracts signed.

The success of virtual sign-ups has also helped the team to embed the new national approach, with viewings and inspections now completed at times which are more suitable for our customers, and not just when one of the team travel.

Better partnerships

What’s more, our teams now have greater focus on specific areas to get things done much faster. We now have colleagues dedicated to working with local authorities to enable greater partnership working and support local initiatives.

We also have a much clearer perspective on empty homes, meaning that we know when and where we have homes available.

This has helped us reduce the amount of time it takes us to re-let homes to around 21 days, down from 29 in the previous year, and helps us support other areas of the business where customers come to us in desperate need.

Listening to you

We’ve also been listening to you about your experiences of moving into one of our properties and working hard to make the moving in process easier for you.

Based on your feedback, we’re making things clearer around what to expect when customers move in to our homes as well as looking at areas where customers are finding the most frustration. Boiler services, for example, now happen when properties are empty so that we can find and fix any faults before you move in.