The recent Budget announcements by the government around cutting social housing rents by per one per cent per year is likely to not only limit housing providers’ ability to build new homes but also affect the stability of their income streams and therefore their credit ratings with potential or existing lenders.
As many housing providers are already doing, one solution is to diversify their income streams, with many instances of housing providers successfully reselling some of their own services, such as repair and maintenance or call centres, to other housing providers, councils and local agencies.
Housing providers’ IT departments should therefore be considering how their wider IT infrastructures could cope with, or indeed actively contribute to, the diversification and reselling of some core services, and take this into account when planning the deployment of new applications or upgrades to their IT infrastructure, perhaps moving to more cloud-based services to give them the ability to scale up and down in line with the demands of the business.
