Tenant-incurred damage remains a challenging problem for social housing maintenance companies. Broadspectrum (BRS) provide maintenance, repairs and FM services to NSW Department of Land & Housing (LAHC) for social housing in both high density and suburban areas. There are three areas of risk/impact in the scope of these services: tenant-incurred damage to housing, tenant dumping of rubbish, and safety of community spaces in those communities. 

Effective housing maintenance services need to be quick to respond to reported damage and at the same time maintain high levels of tenant satisfaction. At the same time, an organisation like BRS is required to reduce maintenance costs in line with the contract from LAHC. This is challenging in an environment where, paradoxically, the more efficient the call centre, the higher the maintenance cost as more jobs are logged and completed. Other environmental factors that compound this issue are the age of the housing stock and the changing demographic of tenants who are often unable to care for properties because of extenuating factors that may include mental health issues; drug and alcohol problems and domestic violence.

As well as reducing maintenance costs, Broadspectrum wished to identify the social, behavioural, emotional and other factors that contribute to housing damage, and to provide better services for both the tenants and the client, LAHC. 

The project team delivered four workshops to Broadspectrum, LAHC and NSW Family and Community Services (FACS), another department with multiple social housing touchpoints. The team reframed the damage problem as a human issue, rather than a maintenance challenge, and in doing so explored the vulnerable populations within social housing and the flow-on effects of those vulnerabilities, such as domestic violence and mental health issues. Replacing blame-laden perspectives and phrases like ‘reducing tenant-incurred damage’ with a more holistic project goal of creating healthy properties and cared-for tenancies was key to the project’s success. 

After the workshops, the researchers delivered five prospective solutions to be trialled by the participating agencies. These included a property upkeep video for tenants; a mobile phone app to help tenants with house maintenance; a contractors-as-educators approach to upskill tenants on repair issues; a list of dos and don’ts around flushing refuse; and a mutual check-in service between tenants and call centre agents that could enable more authentic interactions.