Home Group awards Morgan Sindall Property Services £97m maintenance contract

Morgan Sindall Property Services (MSPS) has secured a repairs and maintenance contract with Housing Association Home Group, one of the UK’s largest providers of high-quality housing, health and social care.

The contract is for an initial seven-year term with the potential to extend for a further seven years and will be to maintain Home Group’s 4,500 properties spread over approximately 5,000 square miles. MSPS will deliver responsive repairs, void refurbishments, heating services and planned improvement works such as kitchen and bathroom replacement and heating system upgrades.

Home Group undertook a stringent procurement exercise with strong emphasis being placed on the need to provide better response times for customers across Home Group’s large geographical spread. A ‘Zoned workforce’ approach with dedicated local setups, multi skilled teams and management staff for each zone will make the service more personal and accessible for local customers as well as helping to improve first time fix.

Paul Walker, Director of Maintenance at Home Group, said: “We’re pleased to be working with Morgan Sindall. It’s vital to us that we work with partners who understand the importance of delivering our customer promise – and delivering a reliable repairs service to customers is a key part of that promise. We’re confident that MSPS’ focus proactive and real-time approach will make sure our customers in Yorkshire get the maintenance experience that they expect from us.”

MSPS will work closely with Home Group’s customer service centre to ensure repair requests are diagnosed accurately and scheduled at a convenient time for customers. Improvement in repair diagnostics will also be supported by technological advancements such as WhatsApp for business. Customers will also benefit from real-time appointment updates and an engineer tracking services, so they know when their engineer is on their way to their property.

Alan Hayward, Managing Director at MSPS, said: “We are delighted to be working with Home Group and to have secured this contract in such challenging times. As a business we are passionate about customer experience and using data to continuously inform and improve our service offering for customers and the communities they live in. We are looking forward to working with Home Group to deliver a service that exceeds their customers’ expectations as well as providing support in communities where it is needed the most.”

A key part of MSPS offer was to support with proactively identifying potential maintenance issues before they become an inconvenience to customers. A minimum of 700 Complete Property Survey visits will be carried out every year enabling Home Group to build on their existing stock information and inform their maintenance programmes.

In-line with Home Group’s five themes of Corporate Social Responsibility, MSPS will work in partnership to develop a social value plan that will include providing work placements and training programmes for local people, apprenticeships, and volunteering opportunities as well as establishing a Home Group Supply Chain Club – ensuring they can best utilise and benefit from the skills, experience and knowledge within the local area.