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How data is transforming housing

Geographic information systems technology is developing at pace. Alex Turner finds out how the innovation can help the housing sector meet the challenges to come

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Garage doors aren’t often discussed in excited tones. But that’s what Andrew Bradley, strategic insight manager at Sovereign Housing Association, is doing as he rattles off a list of benefits that geographic information systems (GIS) technology has brought to his organisation.

“In housing, location is fundamental.”

Chris Jackson, head of commercial markets, Esri

GIS takes cold, hard data and makes it comprehensible and useful by revealing in graphic form how it relates to place.

“Any data can be geospatially enabled,” Mr Bradley says, explaining his garage-based enthusiasm. “In the case of monitoring where [garage] doors are that need replacing, we can quickly pinpoint the best location for a supplier to place them [in relation to our estates] so as to minimise travel time for our maintenance staff.”

Back in 2014, Inside Housing looked at how GIS was driving innovation and saving landlords cash, for example by highlighting the exact scope of grounds maintenance contracts or plotting bedroom tax hotspots.

But time moves quickly in the tech world. What was until recently a toolkit used mostly by specialist operators is moving via browser-based apps and mobile technology into the hands of frontline staff. Meanwhile, the number of options available to landlords has blossomed.

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“There’s been an increase in adoption, from the generic starting point that, in housing, location is fundamental,” says Chris Jackson, head of commercial markets at Esri, a GIS provider. “The need to understand where things are, and how they inter-relate and can be improved is self-evident.” So, what have landlords been doing with GIS – and how can it be applied to the challenges facing them in 2017?

For Sovereign, which uses a bespoke system built on Esri’s technology, the benefits go far beyond pinpointing the best place to stash garage doors. The association recently swelled its stock numbers by 17,000, thanks to a merger with fellow southern English landlord, Spectrum. And GIS is playing an important role in smoothing the union.

Gold dust

One of the first functions to go live was a single web mapping system encompassing all of Sovereign’s 56,000 properties and 10,000 land ‘bundles’. GIS, Mr Bradley says, has helped in decision-making around where new divisional areas should be, with boundaries drawn based on stock density mapping and staff travel times. Its ready integration with back office software, he adds, has enabled closer working between the two halves of the organisation while they temporarily operate separate housing management systems.

“GIS doesn’t create land but it creates opportunity.”

Andrew Bradley, strategic insight manager, Sovereign

Mr Bradley describes GIS as “gold dust” for Sovereign when it comes to assessing stock and identifying development opportunities. “Our strategic asset management director can look at any site across the merged organisation,” he says. “GIS doesn’t create land but it creates opportunity [by] helping you understand your assets.”

The technology has also brought financial benefits, Mr Bradley says. For example, one project mapping mobile phone masts (which attract one-off or regular licensing fees from landowners but can often be forgotten) on Sovereign’s properties, and deciding whether or not to re-license them, has pulled in £187,000.

Such savings have offset the initial £150,000 (plus £50,000 annual running costs) Sovereign has put into expanding its use of GIS. Several dozen browser-based tools have been built for a variety of jobs, with 150 former Spectrum staff being trained up alongside colleagues from their larger merger partner.

Anti-social behaviour teams have an app that layers police and crime figures, open and historic cases and other data to enable quick identification of trends. Meanwhile, map layers accessible to call centre staff mean previously long-winded customer enquiries, including those involving boundary disputes, can now often be resolved over the phone.

The advantages are obvious, says Nick Macready, business development manager at Cadcorp, another GIS provider. “You have someone on a helpdesk with Mr or Mrs Angry, and you no longer have to tell them, ‘I’ll find that out and get back to you’,” he says. “You’re making people’s jobs easier, saving the company money and improving customer service.”

At 39,000-home Orbit Group – which rolled out Cadcorp’s GIS technology widely in 2015 at an initial cost of £30,000 – staff have been quick to get on board. The organisation now has more than 100 datasets it can draw on via an intranet-based setup.

Steve Litchfield, senior GIS analyst at Orbit, says initial scepticism about the value of GIS was quickly put to bed. “People could quickly see the benefits – we’ve had people saying it was like leaping into the 21st century.” Most of Orbit’s 1,300 staff now have access and generate about 70 ‘sessions’ a day, with questions about amenities particularly prevalent.

“I’d say maybe 15% of housing associations now have some form of GIS.”

Craig Godwin, managing director, Oxford Data Consultancy

“We’ve mapped transport, health services, schools, supermarkets, post boxes and so on, so officers can go to tenants and say ‘this is where you can find everything’. It’s been well-received.”

Taking a similar approach to more strategic concerns has led Orbit to add datasets that can help plan development 10 or 20 years down the line, for instance around where new transport links will be built.

“With stuff like HS2, the government has been good at giving us information,” adds Mr Litchfield. “With other data, we’ve had to be more creative with collecting – for some new stations, for example, we’ve had to do our own research.”

GIS is also helping Orbit analyse likely disposals as a result of the Voluntary Right to Buy. “We’ve managed to map all eligible properties [and] look at their proximity to existing offices,” says Mr Litchfield. “Ideally we’d like to rationalise stock so as to encourage tenants in farthest-away homes to buy first.”

Slow start

Despite big players such as Orbit and Sovereign forging ahead with GIS, Cadcorp’s Mr Macready says the technology’s uptake is “not quite there yet”. His firm has more than 40 housing association clients, up by around a quarter over the past three years; Esri, with the biggest market share, has around 100 on its books.

Craig Godwin, managing director of Oxford Data Consultancy, which sells both its own and third-party GIS solutions, says many landlords have yet to appreciate the range of uses.

“I’d say maybe 15% of housing associations now have some form of GIS,” he says. But, he adds, systems get bought in order to bring down specific costs – most often around grounds maintenance – and may fall out of regular use once these goals have been achieved.

The appeal of those savings remains understandably strong. Mr Bradley quotes a saving of £19,000 per year for Sovereign. But Andrew Keljarrett, business improvement manager at 7,000-home Bracknell Forest Homes, reckons his employer would be spending an extra £50,000 annually on staff and admin costs if it hadn’t invested in a very different GIS product, which costs around £17,000 a year, and which demonstrates the technology’s adaptability.

Bracknell Forest Homes is, unusually, responsible for almost 11,000 trees. Yet thanks to browser-based mapping and Collector, a mobile app that can harvest data even when offline, just two staff keep on top of managing them.

“It’s about making sure we have the right customer access in the right areas.”

Sam Carr-Hill, business intelligence performance manager, Hyde

Mr Keljarrett says the association is pushing on with other uses too. Via another app, Bracknell Forest is trying to identify tenants open to downsizing so as to free up family homes.

Housing occupation data is added to the landlord’s GIS system every Monday, before being filtered to identify older residents who are under-occupying homes. A staff member then contacts them and uses the app Survey123 to conduct a short interview on their housing needs and aspirations and whether they’d be interested in moving. Finally the survey data is uploaded to another GIS layer, enabling matches between voids and potential tenants to be made.

Several other housing associations, including 10,000-home Yarlington Housing Group and 50,000-home Hyde Group, say these kinds of demographics-based projects are key to where they are taking GIS next. Both are conducting ‘segmentation’ exercises aimed at tailoring future services towards different groups of tenants.

“For instance, we can see where more people are likely to use digital ways of contacting us, and use that to inform our customer access strategy,” says Sam Carr-Hill, business intelligence performance manager at Hyde. “It’s about making sure we have the right customer access in the right areas.”

Another of Hyde’s aims is to put mobile technology to more extensive use so that officers can update live GIS data – such as outstanding repairs – while out on estates.

This kind of ‘field capture’ is one of the ways in which Esri’s Mr Jackson sees the use of GIS continuing to develop. He also points to the growing use of drones, the potential for homes to transmit real-time information about their energy efficiency, and the emergence of four-dimensional modelling tools that bring time into their analysis, for instance by plotting the movement of sunlight at different times of the year.

Although few housing associations have adopted GIS, interest is growing as the technology begins to incorporate user-friendly settings and move onto familiar devices.

“This is a technology that’s becoming more visible,” says Mr Jackson. “I can only see housing associations’ understanding of it growing.”

Putting tenants in the picture

Few housing associations Inside Housing spoke to have made their GIS capabilities accessible to tenants. However, several say they have used it to demonstrate value for money to resident scrutiny groups. Finding ways to share datasets without compromising sensitive information has been a barrier for many.

Bath-based Curo, however, recently undertook a consultation on grounds maintenance service charges and wanted to show residents exactly what they’d be paying for. “We created an online map,” says business analyst Judith Forde. “When we sent out our final service charge information, everyone got an individual code [to display] where hedges, shrubs and greens are on their estate, where we cut and where the local authority does.”

Ms Forde says tenants have found the maps helpful and have liked being able to see and discuss exactly the same picture as call centre staff.

Orbit’s Mr Litchfield says tenants’ awareness of GIS is gradually rising, thanks to housing officers using its tablet-based system to advise residents during home visits.

Several other housing associations say that they aspire to enable GIS as a reporting tool for residents, for example by enabling them to drop pins onto a map to flag up vandalism or dumped rubbish.

 


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