Property Advertising
Present your properties clearly and attractively in text and images and ensure that prospective tenants make informed choices that are less likely to result in refusals on offer. Use multiple windows for each property to present different aspects or the property such as room views, external garden, floor plans and location maps.
Banding
Social landlords have to cater to the needs of the homeless and other groups in line with their stated policy. Therefore a bidder's needs have to be recognised, assessed and quantified so as to prioritise bids in top down order. Banding based on the questions answered either through awarding points, date allowance or minimum qualification allows such prioritisation when combined with other values such as band date, registration date, disability level, etc.
Entitlement calculation
A household's entitlement is derived from their family composition and key attributes such as age, sex, relationship, needs etc and your property eligibility rules.
Property Matching
Bedroom and property type entitlement can be fixed to exactly match the policy table or flexible allowing default matching criteria that can be edited prior to advertising the property. This allows you to flex the matching to local lettings policies or different organisational rules where partners in a scheme may have different policies.
Bidding
Allow bids for available properties on a limited number or unlimited basis and for properties that match entitled or all properties. A bid basket may be used where an applicant wishes to save and consider a number of choices before confirming.
Location mapping
Through the use of a graphical mapping function the system can show the advertised properties, local amenities such as education, health, religious, transport establishments etc, and even the location of the bidders for a particular property to allow consideration of local bidding patterns and policies.
Home exchanges
Local home exchanges allow households to register their property and state their preferences for what type of property and where they wish to move. The system uses the information provided to allow for efficient two way matching so that mutual exchanges can be organised by tenants themselves.
Housing Options
Define different options for renting or buying and allow applicants to apply for each without the need to duplicate the application information already entered.
Design
The site is designed to suit your scheme with the correct colours, branding and logos displayed. Within multi-organisational or sub-regional sites the property pages can be branded to suit the landlord for that property.
Letters
Letters can be initiated via changes of application data, time based events or administrator events. The letters support a workflow based approach to dealing with new applicants, medical reports, annual reviews and band assessment.
Reporting
Sophisticatated reports may be created and stored for repeat use allowing generation and graphical display of statistics and perfomance information improving control of the application process and supporting review of policy.
Administration
Roles designated as administrators can control key elements of advertising period timing, user access, look up table values and announcements.
Content
Public information displayed on pages whether instructions for how to complete a form or announcements informing of local events is under the control of specified roles. This allows for local definition of the site to suit local needs.
Audit
Each change of applicant details will record what changed and by whom. The system allows administration to record planned actions as well as historical events by particular types.
Feedback
Successful bidders are listed in the public site to provide feedback of typically the band and band date that has been successful with the advertised properties. Predictive forecast of how long a specific household would need to wait in bidding for particular property types by area can be derived (assuming their circumstances did not change ) .
User Interface
The sites are full W3C compliant making full use of the latest design guidelines and cascading style sheets.
Security
Making full use of the latest session-less security involving encryption of passwords and other key data the system aims to keep access secure. Roles can be assigned to backoffice users so they can only see what they are allowed to see.
Data Interfaces
Data from your housing management system can be interfaced using standard xml or csv formats. Typical interfaces into .home include Applicants and Properties with Offers and Applicant changes fed back to the housing management system.