Housemark was thrilled to welcome Kingdom Group as a member earlier this year. We're now hearing from Calum Kippen, Director of Governance, Performance and Risk at Kingdom Group, on why they decided to join...
Q: What were the key drivers for your partnership with Housemark?
A: We want to provide the best possible service for our customers, and working in partnership with Housemark will help us achieve that. At the moment, customers are facing huge challenges with the spiralling cost of living, the energy crisis and just trying to make ends meet. We want to help them as much as we can to cope with everything that’s being thrown at them.
Through our partnership with Housemark, we can seek to operate more efficiently and effectively so that we can keep our rents as low as possible and demonstrate affordability and value for money to our customers.
It also allows us the opportunity to collaborate with others in our sector, so that we can share learning and work together to improve services for our residents.
Q: What are the challenges Kingdom currently faces?
A: As an organisation, we are facing many of the same challenges as our customers. For example, the rising price of energy and materials pushes up the cost of our maintenance, repairs and new-build programmes.
We are all on tight budgets, needing to make efficiencies so we can do more with less money.
The sector as a whole is facing increased pressure on all sides, from closer scrutiny around compliance to demonstrating improved sustainability in how we operate, and these all have cost implications.
Q: How will Housemark support you to address these challenges?
A: Particularly useful are Housemark’s unique monthly pulse reports, which are based on the most up-to-date data. They will allow us to track our performance closely so we can make sound, timely decisions and rapidly adapt to our ever-changing operating environment.
Benchmarking our financial costs and performance against other housing providers will give us a starting point to see how we compare with others in the sector, where we are doing well and where we can improve.
For instance, by looking at areas such as customer satisfaction, time taken to re-let homes, how quickly repairs are carried out and the cost-effectiveness of services, we can identify areas we need to focus on to improve.
It will give us the data to make better, more informed business decisions so that we can provide the best services we can while achieving better value for money.
Importantly, Housemark will also provide peer support and more opportunities for partnership working – learning from each other, sharing our knowledge and experience in order to improve how we do things.
Q: What do you hope, ultimately, to achieve from this partnership?
A: It will support us in our commitment to do the very best for our customers and deliver on our mission – to provide more than a home.
Using Housemark’s benchmarking data and analysis – along with the exciting opportunities to collaborate with others through its conferences, training courses and seminars – we will be able to improve our performance and the performance of our sector overall.
That, in turn, will benefit our customers. Ultimately, it all comes down to improving the lives of the people we serve.
If you’d like to know more about Housemark and our offer, please contact us.