How Can Resident Satisfaction Be Gauged?

Highlights:

Resident satisfaction is a measure of how happy or unhappy tenants are with their accommodation, community, and the level of service offered by their housing provider.
Gauging resident satisfaction is important because people have a right to good-quality housing.
Social housing landlords are now required to collect and publish resident satisfaction data by law.
There are four main ways to gauge resident satisfaction: the number of complaints you receive, transactional surveys, perception surveys, and management data.

Measuring resident satisfaction has always been important to social housing providers.

But collecting resident satisfaction data is now a legal requirement for social housing providers.

This article answers the question, “How can resident satisfaction be gauged?” We’ll also explain what resident satisfaction is and why it’s important.

What Is Resident Satisfaction?

Resident satisfaction is a measure of how happy or unhappy tenants are with:

😃The quality of their accommodation

😃The level of service provided by their landlord

😃The quality of the communal areas managed by their landlord

Why Is Gauging Resident Satisfaction Important?

There are several reasons why measuring resident satisfaction is important.

Because people have the right to a safe, well-maintained home

The quality of someone’s home has a significant impact on the quality of their life. It affects their health and mental wellbeing.

Even if someone can only afford to live in lower-cost social housing, they still deserve a decent standard of living.

Gauging resident satisfaction is one of the ways social housing providers can tell if they are meeting minimum housing standards and providing a good resident experience.

Because tenant satisfaction measures are being monitored

Gauging resident satisfaction is now a regulatory requirement. The Social Housing (Regulation) Act 2023 introduced consumer standards for social housing. This consists of 22 tenant satisfaction measures (TSMs).

Social housing landlords need to survey their residents on the TSMs at least once per year and record the results.

These results need to be shared with the Regulator of Social Housing (RSH) and the landlord’s tenants.

What is the Social Housing (Regulation) Act 2023?

The Social Housing (Regulation) Act was introduced after several high-profile social housing failures which cost people their lives. Two examples are:

The Grenfell Tower fire, in which 72 people died and 70 were injured after unsafe building design caused a fire.
The death of two-year-old Awaab Ishak, who died from a respiratory disease due to damp and mould at his family’s housing association flat.

The Act was made law in July 2023.

It introduced measures to regulate social housing providers, including:

💡Making it easier for RSH to take action against housing providers.

💡Allowing RSH to hold landlords to account by performing regular inspections.

💡Introducing consumer standards for social housing.

💡Giving the Secretary of State powers to require landlords to investigate and fix serious issues.

Tenant satisfaction is (still) declining

Social housing landlords have been surveying their residents on the TSMs since April 2023. Unfortunately, preliminary half-year results from Housemark show that tenant satisfaction looks set to decline for the fifth year running.

What is Housemark?

Housemark is a company that helps UK housing providers to use data effectively. A large number of social housing providers are members and submit data to the company for analysis.

This means the company’s data sample is large enough to reflect the sector as a whole, allowing them to report on industry-wide trends.

Overall satisfaction is down from 85.1% in 2018/19 to 72.3% in the first half of 2023/24. The data measured accounts for 189 social housing providers, representing around half of all social homes.

The data submitted before 2023/24 is voluntary data that the organisation’s members submitted prior to 2023. It is possible that the decline over the last six months could be due to a change in resident satisfaction survey methods.

Nevertheless, it shows that resident satisfaction is an issue that social housing landlords must address.

The introduction of a consistent, industry-wide resident satisfaction survey will help landlords accurately gauge tenant satisfaction so they can see where they need to make improvements.

Four Ways to Gauge Tenant Satisfaction

Here are four broad ways to gauge tenant satisfaction. We’ll explain some of the different data collection methods you can use for each.

Number of complaints

The first and most simple way to gauge resident satisfaction is to track the number of tenant complaints you get.

According to Housemark’s 2022–23 end-of-year results, the average social housing provider received 40.3 Stage 1 complaints for every 1,000 units they manage.

Ideally, you won’t have any. However, reducing the number of complaints you receive year-on-year is a sure sign that resident satisfaction is improving across your portfolio.

However, it is also important to bear in mind that some residents don’t make formal complaints because:

😞They don’t think they will be listened to

😞They don’t know how to

😞They are worried about being evicted if they complain

Transactional resident satisfaction surveys

This is when you ask residents to rate their satisfaction after you have delivered a service for them. For example, let’s say a tenant requests a boiler repair. You send out an engineer who repairs the boiler and the job is signed off. You might then send the tenant an email asking them to rate:

✔️The speed and quality of your response

✔️How friendly and helpful the engineer was

✔️The quality of the engineer’s workmanship

✔️How satisfied they are that you fulfilled their request fully and to their satisfaction

How to use transactional resident satisfaction surveys

⚠️Important: The Social Housing Act says social housing landlords cannot use transactional surveys to report on TSMs.

This is because they are performed after a service is delivered, so they often return misleadingly high satisfaction scores.

These are often 15 percentage points higher than you would get from a perception survey.

However, transactional surveys are still useful. For example, you can use them to see how well different contractors perform, or that individual repairs are being carried out to residents’ satisfaction. They also usually have a good response rate.

Perception-based resident satisfaction surveys

⚠️Under the Social Housing Act, social landlords must use perception surveys to collect data on 12 of the 22 TSMs. Data for the other 10 is collected via management data.

Perception surveys involve asking residents about their overall perception of their landlord.

They are more effective than transactional surveys at finding out how residents feel about their landlord.

For example, transactional surveys may indicate that residents are very satisfied with repairs. However, a perception-based resident satisfaction survey may reveal that their overall satisfaction is low because there are long waiting times for repairs to be carried out.

How to use perception-based resident satisfaction surveys

Perception surveys can be carried out via:

✔️Phone

✔️Email

✔️In person

✔️Post

✔️Online

✔️Text

It’s a good idea to offer multiple resident satisfaction survey methods that suit your resident population.

Phone, email and post are the three most commonly used resident satisfaction survey channels among social housing property managers collecting TSM data.

Perception-based resident satisfaction survey samples

You can survey a random sample of residents or survey your entire resident population. Landlords must get responses from at least 2.3% of their residents, and their sample must be demographically representative of the tenant population.

Perception survey questions

Social housing providers are also required to ask specifically worded questions in TSM surveys. These are:

Taking everything into account, how satisfied or dissatisfied are you with the service provided by your landlord?
Has your landlord carried out a repair to your home in the last 12 months? If yes, how satisfied or dissatisfied are you with the overall repairs service from your landlord over the last 12 months?
Has your landlord carried out a repair to your home in the last 12 months? If yes, how satisfied or dissatisfied are you with the time taken to complete your most recent repair after you reported it?
How satisfied or dissatisfied are you that your landlord provides a home that is well-maintained?
Thinking about the condition of the property or building you live in, how satisfied or dissatisfied are you that your landlord provides a home that is safe?
How satisfied or dissatisfied are you that your landlord listens to your views and acts upon them?
How satisfied or dissatisfied are you that your landlord keeps you informed about things that matter to you?
To what extent do you agree or disagree with the following? “My landlord treats me fairly and with respect.”
Have you made a complaint to your landlord in the last 12 months? If yes, how satisfied or dissatisfied are you with your landlord’s approach to complaints handling?
Do you live in a building with communal areas, either inside or outside, that your landlord is responsible for maintaining? If yes, how satisfied or dissatisfied are you that your landlord keeps these communal areas clean and well-maintained?
How satisfied or dissatisfied are you that your landlord makes a positive contribution to your neighbourhood?
How satisfied or dissatisfied are you with your landlord’s approach to handling anti-social behaviour?

But social housing providers aren’t limited to these questions. You can include additional questions.

We recommend adding open questions like:

How do you feel about your neighbourhood?
How do you feel about your home in general?
How can your housing provider improve?

These questions encourage residents to provide detailed responses on things that concern them. A closed question like, “Do you like your neighbourhood?” is more likely to return a one-word answer.

Management data

Management data is information on the services that you deliver to residents. Property managers collect it using their own systems.

Management data does not directly gauge resident satisfaction. Instead, it measures key performance indicators that impact it.

Examples include:

How quickly you respond to repair and maintenance requests
Your first-time fix rate
How many problems recur within 12 months

Management data is also used to report TSMs. 10 out of the 22 measures require landlords to report management data.

How to use management data

There are two main ways management data can be used to improve resident satisfaction:

Track fulfillment of regulatory requirements: For example, all properties need to have all gas installations checked and signed off by a registered engineer. Management data allows you to track which properties have been checked and which ones haven’t.
Track improvements in problem areas: For example, if your perception surveys show residents have concerns about pests, you may decide to implement pest control measures in all homes. Management data allows you to track how many properties you have installed these measures in and how quickly you have done so.

Management data challenges

Many social housing property managers are stuck using outdated systems to manage their data.

Some use spreadsheets, while others still use paper-based systems.

This leads to several issues:

⚠️Collecting data is time-consuming

⚠️Data is easily lost

⚠️Data is incomplete

⚠️Data is not recorded in a consistent format

⚠️It’s hard or impossible to merge and analyse different datasets

This data is also often siloed in different departments or systems. For example, a landlord’s electrical contractor holds all the electrical data, while its pest control company has all the data on rat infestations.

This makes it difficult to merge and report on different datasets. And if the data can’t be analysed then it’s almost impossible for the landlord to gain useful insights from it.

To overcome these issues, landlords need a centralised digital platform for all their repairs and maintenance management data.

That’s where EVO comes in.

Supercharge your management data with EVO

At EVO, we provide a digital platform that landlords can outsource all of their repairs and maintenance to.

It ensures repairs are carried out quickly and efficiently, and residents are kept informed throughout the process.

But it also automatically collects all management data and stores it in a single central database.

This data is collected and stored in a consistent format. It can also be connected to data analysis tools.

This means you can:

📊Track progress against TSMs and ensure you meet resident expectations

📊Produce management data reports

📊Quickly and easily submit accurate and complete TSM data

📊Create actionable insights on your portfolio

📊Plan resources and budgets

Conclusions

Gauging tenant satisfaction has always been important for the social housing sector. But that importance has intensified thanks to the introduction of TSMs.

Knowing where to start with gauging tenant satisfaction can seem overwhelming if you are new to it - especially for large housing associations.

However, with the right software and suitable data collection methods, you’ll get insights you can use to improve tenant satisfaction.

Plus you can start making better decisions that will make your organisation more efficient and financially sustainable.

PHOTO BY EVO