South Lakes Housing has reported on how it has been using Mobysoft’s RentSense arrears management software since 2012 and almost halved its arrears.
Simon Hughes, head of income, South Lakes Housing, said, “When we started using RentSense in 2012, we had generic housing officers and they were having to check all 3,000 accounts, which was wasting a lot of time, and with the transition to four-weekly housing benefit we only wanted to see and action cases that needed our attention. After the deployment of RentSense, our officers were looking at just 25 per cent of their patches, so straight away we could see the benefits.”
Over time, RentSense has refined its performance by presenting fewer and fewer cases; because South Lakes’ officers have focused on just the cases presented, they have helped to improve performance, lower arrears and reduce the number of cases they need to manage.
Hughes said, “We have maintained upper-quartile performance throughout using RentSense. Of our 3,000 tenancies over the last 9-10 months, the officers have only had around 120 cases per week to look at.
“During the past year, we have tried to create something like RentSense in our new housing management system, but we just couldn’t do so. It was taking up valuable time, money and development resources, and we could see that we were no closer to developing anything like RentSense. We finally stopped any further development because we didn’t want to waste any more time or money.
“RentSense is saving us the equivalent of two or three full-time members of staff, and since 2016 our arrears have fallen from 2.08 per cent to 1.35 percent.”
