Mixed tenure challenges for Housing Associations

A key challenge is how to organise and equip our housing managers to deal with multi-tenure buildings. We now own and manage buildings with every tenure type represented. This demands that the organisation is capable of understanding four or five sets of landlord-tenant relationships and the various intricacies of each must be met. In addition the demands and expectations of the various resident groups are often hard to reconcile.

So what does our new Housing Officer need to know. Firstly, they will have to have a good knowledge of Assured Tenancies, Assured Shorthold Tenancies, and Leaseholders. Secondly, they will need the ability to deal with and reconcile the differing service demands and expectations of a wide range of income groups, and thirdly, they will need to be able to prioritise their workload in an extraordinarily effective way.

Aside from the need for comprehensive knowledge of the legal status and processes across the various tenures, the more difficult practical impact of staff time is likely to revolve around the needs of traditional leasehold block management, and the requirements of tenancy or personal management that comes with managing highly stressed, often vulnerable general needs residents.

A typical clash of priorities might be an escalated service charge dispute raised by leaseholders against the difficult financial situation of a single parent. In these cases one is highly visible and a known priority, the other is a hidden but potentially life-defining issue. From an organisational point of view it takes a great deal of discipline to make the right choice in terms of priorities.

My argument is that these priorities cannot be reconciled by a single member of staff. Mixed tenure blocks require the input of different specialists; this poses its own challenges in eliminating duplication, but it is easier to resolve this problem than the ones outlined above.

Not surprisingly as an advocate of specialist leasehold managers, the functions is that they do the block managements and leave the tenancy management to traditional HA housing managers.

If this does reconcile the organisational difficulties then that still leaves landlords with significant challenges around creating a sense of place by getting the design, build, and selling letting correct. The dilemma of having people in the same building with vastly different incomes won’t go away quickly. We are also about to see the impact of some far-reaching government policy on welfare reform, rent regimes, income caps on social rented accommodation and the extension of the RTB.

Steve Michaux is Group Director of Leasehold Services at A2dominion and Chair of the National Leasehold Group