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Bolton: The adapter

Bolton council’s Homes For You service received £300,000 from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister’s pilot scheme fund and has been live since October 2001. It covers 27,000 homes in total and includes eight housing associations as well as the council. Between January and March this year, there were 12,961 bids from tenants. Bolton’s project manager Dominic Conway explains how he adapted his existing systems to support the project. What did you do?
We wanted to make sure that the system we used integrated with our Open Housing Management System, so we asked our existing IT supplier Anite to enhance that to support choice-based lettings. For example, when our housing officers want a shortlist of tenants for a void property, the system gives them a list of people who’ve expressed an interest in that property, rather than people who’ve just expressed an interest in the general area. We’ve got a website where people can view properties and make bids, but it’s not integrated, so there has to be someone manually inputting the web data into the housing management system. We already had the housing associations networked into the common housing register. They link into the Anite system by ISDN line or ordinary dial-up access. We create weekly advertisements for the local paper in the QuarkXPress desktop publishing program and send them to the printers as PDF files, although some products you can buy have an integrated desktop publishing facility. How much did it cost?
£20,000 for the adjustments to the Anite system, plus the cost of the website and buying QuarkXPress. How long did it take?
Two months to set up the website, six to adapt the housing management system. Can tenants see where they are on the list?
Not at the moment, but we plan to post a weekly list of let properties with the number of bids and the earliest bid date. What are the pros and cons?
Bolton has trebled its housing register from 6500 to 15,000 since October 2001. Qualitative research has shown that people really like the concept of choice. Needing to input the data separately into the back office does have cost implications. But developing an integrated website is expensive, and you can’t just bin the old rent and repairs systems. Is there anything you’d do differently?
The ready-made products available now are much more advanced than when we set off. If I was doing it again, I’d look at what’s out there and buy something off the shelf. homesforyou.org.uk

Bradford: The bespoke option

Bradford Community Housing Trust’s Homehunter was set up with £500,000 of funding as part of a pilot scheme run by the then Department for Transport, Local Government and the Regions. It covers 36,000 properties from the trust, private landlords and seven partner registered social landlords. The system went live in April 2002, and now receives 11,000 expressions of interest every week. Project manager Naser Patel describes how the organisation partnered with software company Comino to develop a bespoke system – now retailed off the shelf as Universal Choice Based Lettings. What did you do?
I went to look at the systems in Holland and sent Comino a spec for exactly how we wanted the system to work. They had already done quite a bit of work for us in-house, so the ideal situation was for them to carry on because they knew how it all worked. Homehunter is completely new, and fully integrated into our in-house systems. When a termination notice is put on the system, all the details – address, type of housing, number of rooms – are automatically transferred to the website. All we’ve got to do is write the marketing spiel. All organisations involved can access the back-end of the website with unique usernames and passwords to put pictures and details on – there’s no paper at all. All we do in the middle is coordinate. Once we’ve found a suitable person, the system transfers all the information into the system with one press of a button. RSLs can view bids for properties at their end. We use a geographical information system (GIS) on the website so people can get a map and local information as well as the house details. If someone wants to live in the BD10 postcode, for example, we can show them all the amenities within a one-mile radius. Our housing register has grown from 3000 to 20,000, but we designed the system to be hammered and it’s coped very well. We’ve got 15 kiosks in housing offices, community centres, town halls and the tourist information office, and 15 computers across Bradford in advice centres to get people online. We’re thinking of putting kiosks in supermarkets that are open 24 hours a day. We’re also looking into an add-on package to manage text-message bidding from mobile phones. Can tenants see where they are on the list?
Yes. As soon as they place a bid it tells them their position in the queue, so they can decide whether to stay or transfer the bid to an alternative property. They can also return later to see whether there’s been any change. How much did it cost?
Just under £100,000. But if you buy a package for £20,000-£30,000, it doesn’t do what you want, so you have to buy another one to complement it and it all adds up anyway. How long did it take?
It was very quick – two months to get the full system up and running. What are the pros and cons?
The biggest advantage is that it’s completely customer-driven – customers can decide what to bid for and they know exactly what properties are on offer and why they weren’t successful. We’ve cut down on a lot of enquiries because people can see everything in front of them. On the downside, people are starting to complain about our existing housing management system. What we’ve got for choice-based lettings is so easy to use that it really shows up the disadvantages of the old system. Is there anything you’d do differently?
If I could afford it, I’d have Homehunter on Sky Digital TV so people could interact with it through their televisions, but it costs about £250,000 just to get yourself on there. www.bradfordhomehunter.co.uk

Warrington: Off the shelf

Warrington council’s Chooseahome scheme was launched last month to cover 3500 homes in the Orford area and will be rolled out borough-wide by April 2004 to the council’s full stock of 9500. In its first week, it received 72 bids – an average of six per property – and this shot up to 191 in week two. Although no housing associations are included so far, they will be invited to join once the scheme is fully up and running. Andrew Oates, area housing manager, explains how choice-based lettings were introduced without a large budget or pilot funding. What did you do?
All our systems – rents, repairs, tenancy management – were provided by Sx3, so we bought its choice-based lettings package and attached it to our existing allocations system. Chooseahome has a separate website from the council. We took the site Sx3 offered off the shelf and added our own information. There are some elements of the site that aren’t ready yet – icons that show whether a home has central heating, for example. From July, tenants will be able to update their applications on our system through the website. The council’s main server had to be upgraded because of security issues – there was the possibility that people would hack into the back office through the web. By the end of July, we’re hoping to be able to accept e-payments, where people can log onto the website and pay their rent by debit card. We also want people to be able to apply for housing online. At the moment, they can download the form but they have to print it out and send it in. Can tenants see where they are on the list?
No, but they can see how many other bids have been placed. Priority order isn’t worked out until bidding has closed. How much did it cost?
£20,000 for the software. In staff time, I’ve no idea –a lot. How long did it take?
We started thinking about it last September. There wasn’t a massive amount of consultancy work – it helped that we already had Sx3 products. It needed a couple of days to set up the new allocations system, and three for the website. We did a lot of the background work ourselves, to reduce costs. What are the pros and cons?
We already had a good relationship with Sx3, so the integration went relatively smoothly. We don’t have a lot of website expertise in house, so they helped us there. Buying an off-the-shelf system didn’t really give us any flexibility to tailor it to our needs. Sometimes we were a bit restricted in what we could and couldn’t do. But the main problem was getting licences from Ordnance Survey for maps for the GIS system. Is there anything you’d do differently?
In hindsight, we’d take a bit more time over it. We introduced it in a bit of a rush, and there are still bits that aren’t quite right. www.chooseahome.org