‘Meeting an increased need to maximise our potential’

Case study
Group: Home Group
Name: Anthony Bell, head of asset management

Home Group’s UK-wide portfolio offers a range of challenges when it comes to monitoring performance, implementing strategies and making decisions for the future.

At its heart, Home Group remains a registered provider committed to providing a range of social and affordable housing solutions to address the range of housing problems the country faces. However, with the recent rent reduction and prospect of voluntary Right to Buy, there is an increased need to ensure our existing asset portfolio is maximising its potential to support our future development programme.

Hometrack has been able to provide much-needed data to help Home Group monitor its performance. We remain one of only a few registered providers that has completed an 100 per cent stock survey and acquiring market performance data was the next step.

We chose Hometrack as our Automated Valuation Model (AVM) operator because of its experience in the AVM space and understanding of the housing market. Its data is used by registered providers, major banks and lenders and is accredited by all three UK ratings agencies, which gave us the confidence to integrate this data into our systems.

Hometrack runs all of the calculations on its server, so there is no need to adapt our processes or databases to interact with a third party system, and there are no training requirements to using the data.

Valuation data is provided to Home Group in a simple format that can be easily uploaded to our property database system, instantly integrating with our existing processes.

Data from Hometrack has enabled us to monitor the performance of its assets at a unit level and amalgamate data to review estates and regions.

Because the portfolio is revalued every three months, we now have access to almost real-time valuation information on every property. After extensive testing of the data over a three-month period, Home Group is now using Hometrack’s data in financial reporting and monitoring the portfolio. In the coming months we anticipate using Hometrack’s market value information to inform our social and affordable rent setting processes to establish 1999 values and market rent (80 per cent).

Holding valuation data for every property had an immediate impact on how we looked at our portfolio and we were able to quickly identify problem areas, together with previously untapped opportunities for regeneration and future investment.