Estate management implementation overview
An effective approach to the regeneration of estates demands a wide range of integrated policies tackling education, health, crime, the environment and economic issues. Nonetheless, the way in which a housing organisation manages the physical care, repair and improvement of the estates within their jurisdiction directly affects the quality of life and environment enjoyed by residents. A typical estate management policy published by a housing organisation sets out their approach to the delivery and management of estate services to internal and external communal areas, with the term 'estate' being used to reference and compartmentalise any specific building or locality. Within Civica Cx Housing, the customisation of individual estate records is completely under the control of the end user, linking through to any asset hierarchy node via the overarching functional unit, which could be a block of flats, a collection of houses on a street, a row of garages, green spaces, car parking zones, allotments, etc. Typically, a housing organisation will carry out estate inspections on a monthly basis, supported by tenants' groups and other elected members. By walking each route, officers are not only able to check that the area complies with published standards, but also provides the chance to engage with residents in person, taking full account of their views and helping to lay the foundations for good working relationships. During each inspection, a number of key focus areas are usually targeted, such as broken pathways, damaged fencing, graffiti, dumped rubbish and drug litter, overgrown communal areas, as well as identifying and issuing external repairs to properties. It is also an opportunity to ensure that residents adhere to their tenancy conditions e.g. that gardens are kept tidy, that all household rubbish is disposed of in the correct way, and that car parks are only used for resident and visitor parking. Routine and frequent estate inspections also enable officers to undertake contractor performance evaluation against the service standards set out for, say, stairwell cleaning and grounds maintenance, identifying any areas for concern or improvement.
Once each required estate record has been created, ad hoc and scheduled inspections can then be configured in the form of iterative estate management cases. These enable every aspect of the planning and preparation phases to be compiled, together with the all-important risk assessment analysis - a process informed by the automatic consolidation of system alerts recorded against any assets within the linked hierarchy or associated contacts and groups. Once an inspection has been conducted, all outcomes, observations and actions can then be captured within the estate management case file, with the option to trigger other system cases and customer engagement services, as appropriate.
Separate help articles have been created for each key aspect of estate management implementation, including: