Member Article

Cottsway achieves lowest ever rent arrears

Cottsway Housing Association has achieved its lowest ever rent arrears of 1.13% by using Mobysoft’s RentSense solution.

Cottsway, originally a stock transfer from West Oxfordshire District Council, owns around 5,000 properties based across nine local authorities.

The Witney based social landlord had a target of achieving 1.87% for its current tenants rent arrears by financial year end of 2016/17. However, their income team, using RentSense and its predictive analytics, achieved a collection rate of 99.9% and out-performed their start of year target achieving arrears of just 1.13%.

RentSense has helped Cottsway’s income team focus on working on the right cases at the right time, and it helps differentiate between a true arrear and a technical arrear, and in the process it presents far fewer cases. Indeed, the front-line officer caseload reduction is 63%. Before RentSense Cottsway used their Housing Management System (HMS) to manage their rent arrears caseload, but it was presenting 2,081 cases a week, by contrast RentSense recommends just 768. The HMS was recommending cases that required no action, whilst RentSense uses predictive analytics to monitor payments to understand which tenants are likely to pay their rent irrespective of contact from their landlord.

According to Wendy Hardy, income manager at Cottsway:

“RentSense has helped the team by getting them to focus on the right cases at the right time. It has helped create officer capacity and given the team more time to focus on complex cases and the households that need the attention, which in turn has helped improve our performance.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Adrian Mills .