Hume Community Housing

They build new properties, manage tenancies for owners and provide services and support their customers through a range of partnerships with organisations that provide personal and financial counselling, relief organisations, family support, mental health services, drug and alcohol services to name a few.

Hume provides three types of housing:

• Social housing: for people on low to moderate incomes who can’t afford to rent in the private market.
• Affordable housing: to help people who are working but earning low to moderate incomes and are finding it difficult to pay the amount of rent being asked in the private market.
• Transitional housing: a short-term program that helps people without a home get ready to live in stable housing.

Brief

The Social Management Transfer Program (SMTP) is a 36-month Family and Community Serivces (FACS) initiative to transfer the tenancy management of around 14,000 social housing tenancies to community housing providers.

There are 144,000 social housing properties across NSW with 19% already managed by community housing providers. The changes will bring this up to 32%. With this program, the NSW Government wants to make sure social housing has a more positive impact on people’s lives and make the most of community networks to deliver better long-term outcomes for tenants and applicants; make the social housing system stronger and more diverse access more sources of funding that are available to community housing providers to better support tenants; and build up the skills and size of the community housing sector.

What we did

HKA Advisory helped Hume win the tender to take over the management of the social housing portfolio for the Hunter New England region (Maitland, Raymond Terrace, and Port Stephens); the largest of all nine regional packages.

The package comprises 2,200 properties with close to 5,000 people in residence. Given the current size of Hume’s housing and customer portfolio, this means that Hume will double in size and their customer base will reach close to 10,000 customers over the next 12 month. The growth will have a huge impact on the organisation, not only in size but structure and set-up will be affected due to:

— Systems and processes need to be improved or implemented
— Additional resources need to be defined, and job descriptions and processes developed
— New staff needed in the new locations to be hired, on-boarded, trained and integrated
— Finance and investment strategies need to be planned and agreed with lenders
— Core organisational processes need to be reviewed, adopted and implemented
— Data management and digital processes need to be adjusted to new requirements
— Legal and contractual asset management, rental debit procedures
— New offices need to be identified, leased and fitted out
— New management process designed and organisational structured adopted and implemented
— A complex network of stakeholders in Federal and Local Government, existing and new staff, local and regional partnerships needs to be managed and satisfied.

Outcomes

Hume’s Board and Leadership Team realised the challenge of such an organisational transformation very early on during the tender process, and in response HKA was asked to provide dedicated resources to help deliver this mission critical program with Hume.

HKA set-up a fully operational Transformation Program Office and a Program Delivery Framework. In July we moved into the mobilisation and operational readiness phase which will continue until mid-2019. We are now working towards the successful delivery of the transformation program, having established and hired all internal program resources and transformation team members from across the organisation including new hires.