The easiest way to make new housing schemes work is to enable good people to work together. That may sound obvious, but it’s also a choice those working in our sector have to factor in. Jonathan Pearson, director of Residentially, explains.
This is an all-too common situation that will be familiar to many of my housing colleagues across the country. New business is excited by a new housing site and moves it through the early gates. Then, the team that will be responsible for marketing and selling the resulting properties is brought on board. Suddenly, the finances don’t seem to add up, and that new development project no longer appears to make as much sense.
It’s completely understandable why this disconnect between teams can happen. After all, both sides are coming at it from very reasonable perspectives. Those working in development need to be competitive to win land, and can therefore push property values to the higher end of the scale. Those in sales and marketing have a closer understanding of buyer behaviour, due to the nature of their work, so they become wary of prices or housing types that won’t match buyers’ expectations or needs.
Each side also uses an impartial valuer they trust to reach their conclusions, and with market evidence that backs this up. But if this goes on in isolation, without one shared commercial view and one set of numbers everyone feels ownership of, projects ultimately risk stumbling at the first serious round of scrutiny.
What can follow is rework, whether it’s re-cutting property mixes, re-running appraisals or revisiting values. It takes effort, time and money to adjust the mix of houses, the mix of shared ownership or the values. And the longer this goes on, the more momentum drains from the project just when it needs it most. I’ve seen schemes both large and small stall for exactly this reason, with plans grinding to a halt, while cashflow and confidence suffer. In some cases, they simply fail to get off the ground at all. Not because it was a bad site, but because the organisation failed to align its approach early enough.
If new business and sales teams aren’t aligned, homes get built that are difficult to sell. Or worse, nothing gets built at all. So when sales teams are brought into the room from day one, the housing tenures and pricing are shaped by what people are most likely to buy from the start, with the correct mix for both delivering the best value to acquire the site and securing the best outcome. As sales and marketing are involved in the process from the kick-off point, and stay in, schemes are designed to fit their markets better, appraisals survive first contact with reality, and importantly, residents get their keys sooner.
An example where we see this work well is at housing association Places for People, where Residentially acts for both the development and sales teams. These two teams meet face-to-face every week to put their separate evidence on the table, challenge it, and agree a way forward. Differences arise, of course, and it doesn’t end debate. What it does is focus that debate on facts. And when you present facts together, at the same time, pride of authorship dissolves. Decisions speed up as they’re handled together and turned into shared decisions. Whether its sales or development instructing us, the full and informed team are already on board and it’s already collaborative.
The teams that perform best also create these weekly, in-person sessions where people work well together. With more of us working from home, nuances that could emerge in a five-minute corridor chat could be missed on a call, or lost in an email chain. Meeting face-to-face, once a week, ensures small misalignments are corrected before they become expensive.
Whilst not rocket science, this collaboration does not ask sales to abandon compliance, nor development to abandon discipline, it asks both teams to respect the other’s vantage point and share the work. When sales express concerns about values, they are able to demonstrate this using evidence from the ground and the wider market. When development needs to keep a land bid competitive, sales engage by offering factors that would make the homes genuinely more saleable, drawing on the strengths of both teams.
Residentially works exclusively with housing associations and acts as valuers for both development and marketing teams, so we have seen both sides of this and the pattern is consistent. The programmes that work best do so because teams are working collaboratively, while the ones that falter are not. Where development and sales start and remain aligned, schemes fit their markets better, appraisals survive first contact with reality and residents get into homes sooner. Where they don’t, the voids and unmet plans tell their own story.
