Tenant Panel: Improving the Move-in Experience

You are invited to a special Tenant Panel meeting on Tuesday 9th April from 11am till 3.30pm.

Normally the Tenant Panel meetings are  a couple of hours long, and have lots of different items on the agenda, but we are holding a special all-day event this time for  you to suggest recommendations on how to make the experience of moving into a Seaside home run more smoothly. In the past two tenant panel meetings (October & January), the attending tenants have explored what the move-in process is like as a new Seaside Homes tenant. Tenants raised this as an area of particular concern, as many people have found the experience of moving in to their Seaside Homes property a complicated and sometimes stressful time.

Issues raised by tenants so far include:

• Tenants often get very short notice – between 1 and 3 days – between first viewing a property and the tenancy start date. This can make packing and moving difficult and stressful. We’ve heard that the Council offer a bus pass for the day of the move but this can be impractical when moving furniture.   
• Debt left on utility meters and other difficulties setting up utilities, including finding out who the utilities provider is, where the meters are, and setting up a new contract or top up key card on the move-in day. Sometimes tenants end up with no heating or hot water on the move-in day which adds to an already stressful situation.

If we want to improve things we need to think about whose help and support we need to do so. The Seaside team have been working with the Council’s Temporary Accommodation team – sharing feedback from panel meetings with them and working out how we can do things differently to remove the challenges that tenants are facing.  

We have invited involved tenants to complete two online surveys on this topic to gain more of your insights. If you would like to receive these surveys please sign up to the Survey category of our SMS service here or text SURVEY to 07860018276. You can also request this survey by post by texting SURVEY BY POST or giving us a ring or email.

Seaside staff have arranged to shadow a Housing Officer on viewings this week to gain more insight and information on the process. We will present this to the Panel, alongside the teams’ procedures, the feedback from the tenant surveys, performance information, and feedback from the “Welcome” surveys we send regularly to new tenants.

We have also invited members of the Temporary Accommodation team to attend the meeting and work with you on identifying issues and proposing solutions.

On Tuesday, 9th April we’re going to have a working meeting looking at ‘the tenant journey’ – how it works now and what it would look like if it worked better. Once we have a picture of what a really good move in experience looks like, we can consider how we can make it happen. There will be some changes we can make quickly; other changes may take a bit more time.  

The aim of the day is for you to review all of the information, speak to Seaside and Council staff, and then to pull together a list of your recommendations.

These recommendations will be reviewed by Council managers, Seaside staff, and be presented to the Seaside Board of Trustees. An action plan will then be proposed to put your recommendations into action. We will publish this action plan and keep you informed of our progress.