At the recent CWAG AGM, Jonathan Cox from Housemark discussed the practical issues and challenges involved in achieving compliant data collection arrangements by April 2023 when TSMs are introduced.

The overall trend in perception surveys over the past 5 years has consistently shown a decline in satisfaction levels. Many landlords stopped carrying out the STAR survey once this was no longer mandatory, these landlords will find their baseline is now much lower than historical data.

The move to perception based TSMs will provide landlords with important resident feedback to constructively drive improvements that tenants recognise and value. However, in his presentation Jonathan identified five barriers to making the most of TSM survey feedback including being overly focussed on scores, a fragmented approach to surveying, questions overload and survey fatigue, as well as a lack of internal capacity to use the data effectively.

Housemark has also identified 11 major variables affecting perception survey scores including:

Contextual Issues

  • Location / Urbanisation (tenants in cities report lower satisfaction)
  • Tenant age (older people tend to be more satisfied)
  • Tenure type (leaseholders, although not part of TSM surveying, tend be the most dissatisfied followed by shared owners with renters relatively more satisfied)
  • Size of landlord (smaller landlords tend to get higher scores, possibly because there is likely to be a single point of contact for tenants)

Methodological Issues

  • Collection method will impact on scores (on-line surveys will be 10 -15 points lower than face-to-face surveying, with telephone surveys somewhere in between) Transactional surveys give the highest scores but are not allowed for TSMs)
  • Sample selection (general needs stock will differ from more specialist provision),
  • Scale (smaller sample sizes can distort results)
  • Time of year (scores of surveys carried out in Winter are approximately 2% lower than for surveys carried out in Summer)

Landlord performance drivers

  • Landlord accessibility and responsiveness (how quickly and easily can the tenant contact the landlord and resolve issues)
  • Respectful and helpful engagement (is the landlord perceived as helpful and respectful in the way it engages with tenants)
  • Responsive repairs (tenant experience of the landlord on responsive repairs is a significant driver of overall perception of, and satisfaction with the landlord)