Asset Management

This article provides a guide for social housing asset management as a comprehensive, integrated system, drawn from the relatively new field of Asset Management, filling a significant knowledge gap.
If Community or Social Housing providers are to take responsibility for acquiring, maintaining, upgrading, renewing and redeveloping housing stock and establishing themselves as sound asset managers, then the social housing sector needs to be informed by best practice asset management.
This report examines tenancy sustainment patterns in Unison’s Rooming House and Long-Term housing stock. It builds on previous work published by the Unison Housing Research Lab on early tenancy loss, by examining the full spectrum of different times at which tenancies either exit or continue. Understanding tenancy sustainment patterns is critical to Housing Associations like Unison, for whom a large proportion of tenants have experienced sustained social and economic exclusion and chronic housing instability. Improving tenancy sustainment rates is one of the key goals of many social housing providers and for good reason. Extant research shows there are clear social and economic benefits when households maintain their social housing tenancies.
Social housing management refers to an overall goal designed to produce and allocate housing services on a needs basis. Social housing asset management concerns the asset management practices of jurisdictions engaged in providing and managing social housing stock. This usually includes acquisition, sale, stock transfer, renting, allocation, repairs and maintenance.