The Housing App: The inspection tool costing less than £3 per inspection that’s a significant timesaver

We’re a small team at Oadby & Wigston Borough Council, managing around 800 properties within our selective licensing scheme, 14 houses in multiple occupation and approximately 5,000 private rented properties within the borough. Due to our size, it is essential that we are as efficient as possible. We undertake HHSRS inspections as standard, but this is only logistically possible due to the time saved by having The Housing App. It streamlines the HHSRS, a system which has been designed by academics, and whilst being a thorough process, it can be difficult for people to get to grips with, by virtue of the level of detail required.

Complaints regarding properties can be made by either a tenant or professional, are received by our customer services team and then allocated to a case officer. These include issues regarding damp and mould, disrepair, harassment and illegal eviction.

The Housing App allows us to programme and manage inspections quickly, add the source of the hazard(s) or defect(s) as we inspect the property, rate these hazards and then share a copy of an auto-generated report populated with all notes and scoring with all parties. On average, the whole process takes us just a few hours. Without use of the app, the report writing and schedule of works post-inspection could take our officers days to process whilst juggling a varied workload.

Also from a manager’s perspective I am able to support my team from anywhere, as I can log in to the app and view any inspection they have completed, at any time, and provide relevant feedback or support. I can also see the number of inspections we have completed within a year and hazards identified, which makes life far easier when it comes to reporting and frees up more of my time to undertake operational work.

I have also been extremely impressed with how willing RHE are to listen to feedback and how keen they are to ensure the app is as effective and comprehensive as possible. I look forward to working with them to continue to add invaluable time-saving features moving forward.

At a time when we’re unlikely to gain additional staff or resources, The Housing App makes our inspection process so much quicker and more efficient.

With thanks to Ben Clark-Monks, Selective Licensing Team Leader at Oadby and Wigston Borough Council