Above and beyond: enhancing health and well being of older people through delivering a bespoke repair service

This paper explores the potential for changing property management delivery to contribute to tenants health and wellbeing. The research focuses on the delivery of a bespoke repair service for older people, utilising a single organisational case study of a social landlord who has recently transitioned away from a traditional delivery model. While social housing management has been identified as a fluid concept, with shifting welfare versus property emphases (Franklin and Clapham 1997; Walker, 2000), property management generally, and the wider benefits that effective and innovative delivery can achieve for stakeholders, remains under-researched (Sanderson and Read, 2020). Moreover, service delivery issues are key to the current policy agenda of improving property management across the rented sector (CIH, 2020) The older people and housing agenda is diverse; however property management is less considered within this. Through interviews and a round table event with professionals involved in developing and implementing the bespoke repairs service in practice, the research demonstrates how contacts with the essential repairs service can be a source of added value – in terms of addressing social isolation and improving wellbeing - going above and beyond to offer wider benefits for the residents and the organisation. The research has practical implications for landlords as learning organisations and in raising awareness of current activities and sharing good practice (RICS, 2016). It contributes to the housing and older people policy agenda as well as a wider re-imagining of housing management, and how it is evaluated within an evolving policy context.