What was the motivation for investing in RentSense as an already high performing landlord?

We want to maintain performance and support our tenants. However, we recognised the threat that Universal Credit poses to our income stream, as it has been well documented across the sector.

Before RentSense you used your HMS and additional reporting through SAP, what were the issues with this?

Even with the additional reporting there was a lack of trust with the results from the income reports and officers would typically go through each account making sure no accounts were missed

We looked at what our HMS provider could deliver, but RentSense was, and still is, the only proven system available. We went to see other landlords and they were all supporters of RentSense, and we saw how it could really help us in the way we wanted to work,

Part of the business case for RentSense looked at freeing up 1.45 FTE capacity, do you think this has been achieved?

Yes, it probably has, if you think of all the wasted time spent checking accounts that did not need to be looked at. It means now we are targeting the cases that matter and we have more time to support our tenants.

You have also measured the impact of RentSense with other metrics as well, such as tenants in arrears?

The number of tenants in arrears were falling throughout the year and at the end of December 2018 the amount was 1,245, after the implementation of RentSense in January 2019, this has dropped to just 555 as at the end of March 2019. It has really helped us focus more time with tenants, this has been critical as cases are becoming more complex and the need to support tenants has become more intense, RentSense allows you to only focus on those cases that need to be looked at, giving you the time to support the tenants.

And also your arrears have fallen by a further £38,000 to less than £250,000. Have there been other benefits too?

Yes, arrears have fallen, and they were less than 1% before RentSense. But also RentSense has helped unify working practices across the team, the officers work in the same way and focus their efforts on the cases that need their attention.

The team are also able to get through their weekly caseload now, and work across one another’s patches when people are on annual leave, so the work always gets done.

Has the reporting helped from a management perspective?

The information that RentSense’s reporting gives me enables me to see how the arrears are broken down on each patch separating universal credit arrears with general arrears, and the RentSense reports provide a lot of detail that we didn’t have before.

Would you recommned RentSensr to other landlords?

RentSense has supported us in increasing collections rates, reducing our evictions and taking fewer people to court, this shows we are supporting our tenants by getting to the cases at the earliest stage and helping tenants get out of debt and back on track, and that is what RentSense is helping us achieve.