Member Article

Connect Housing achieves Upper Quartile Performance with predictive analytics

Connect Housing, a social landlord in West Yorkshire with around 3,000 properties, invested in Mobysoft’s RentSense, a predictive analytical solution, which has enabled the income team to reduce arrears and achieve upper quartile performance within Housemark’s benchmarking.

Connect Housing have been using RentSense since April 2015, when according to Ilyas Lunat, the Income Services Manager at Connect Housing, Connect were looking to deliver more for less and enable their income team to work more efficiently by targeting just the cases they needed to. An internal had highlighted how the income team were wasting 20% of their time, essentially one day a week, on tasks such as checking cases that required no action.

RentSense’s impact was to substantially reduce caseload by 54.7% from 1,321 cases per week to 599. In turn by presenting the income team with just the cases they require it has enabled them to accelerate Connect’s reducing arrears levels and eliminate the time wastage.

Since the deployment of RentSense the income team has been able to reduce arrears by 28.6% over two years, they are currently 2.0%, the lowest for level for eleven years and it has enabled Connect to collect over £100,000 in arrears in that time. Moreover, this has coincided with the Connect income team achieving Upper Quartile Housemark benchmark performance for arrears.

Ilyas credits RentSense with enabling the income team to work more efficiently and essentially tackle just the cases they need to which has helped further improve performance but also change how they deal with residents in arrears.

“RentSense helps us maintain low arrears as it picks up the debt earlier, and also evictions are low and tenancies are sustained, which is key for us as an organisation. It is the simple things,” explains Ilyas.

“It (RentSense) is giving the income team more clarity in their work and they are able to achieve more and help improve Connect’s overall performance.”

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