Circle Housing Circle 33, part of the Circle Housing Group, is working with Experian to filter and screen tenancy records of its 8,400 properties using a data-matching technique to flag tenant records or properties which might present a high risk of fraud. Although the project was reported as costing less than £5,000, six months after the start of the project, the housing provider had reclaimed 65 properties by November 2013, worth an estimated saving of around £1.2 million.
Jamie Branch, investigator, Circle Housing Circle 33, said, “Experian has been working in partnership with Circle Housing Circle 33 for only six months but has already achieved significant results, with six per cent of properties under management identified as high or very high risk. Experian’s systems provide robust data and flag strong matches, pulling out discrepancies among tenancy records to produce a high number of leads for investigation. As a result of our partnership, we’re expecting between 80 and 100 properties to be recovered by the end of the year – double last year’s target.”
Circle Housing Circle 33 also plans to sign up with the Rental Exchange, a partnership between Experian and Big Issue Invest, to share rental payment information, with the aim of enabling some of its tenants to improve their credit scores and gain access to lower cost credit, at the same time as detecting unlawful occupancies across multiple housing associations.
