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Having operated in social housing for over 20 years, we are a leading provider of innovative solutions to RSL’s and we continue to invest heavily in both our products and services to better support and optimise our clients’ asset management and investment operations. More than just software providers Our vast body of corporate asset management, data, systems and business knowledge is rightly trusted across the sector, with most of our consultancy work (and software sales) deriving from word-of-mouth referral. Our market-leading Asset Valuation and Option Appraisal Services and software, currently utilised by many G15 members and smaller RSLs, is grounded in the fundamentals of investment theory, providing our clients with data, information and methodologies that enable them to identify the social, financial, and strategic ‘opportunity costs’ of each investment and to robustly rank varied options. Our experienced consulting team continues to provide confidential asset management turnaround and improvement services, offering situation analysis, remedies and action plans, that afford solutions for manual and IT systems and data issues, to allow organisations to realign asset management activities with their strategic goals and recover or maximise social and financial value within their portfolios. Change management, BPR and temporary management projects are key elements of these activities. Visit us on stand 8 at the NHF asset management and maintenance exhibition, 11th & 12th October in Coventry to learn more about our offerings.

A key issue facing social housing landlords today is how to improve the quality of existing housing stock in a way that is environmentally, socially, and economically viable and sustainable. Energy efficiency and zero net carbon criteria are (as they should be) at the heart of any sustainability agenda and social housing professionals are fully engaged in innovative responses to environmental responsibility, whether it be for new build projects or on-going property maintenance. With a mature understanding of environmental agendas, organisations are aware of how the sustainability agenda impacts the way in which they perceive the performance of their social housing, but does the current approach fully address social/strategic and economic aspects of sustainability? To date it has been difficult to see sustainability as a joined up environmental, social and economic agenda and they tend to be managed as isolated agendas. The meaning of sustainability can be unclear and undefined within single organisations as well as across the sector, reducing its impact. This may well be because of the vast range of criteria that would need to be considered and assessed holistically. Most critically, how can all these criteria be integrated into a decision-support model that is robust and defendable? Taking a multi-criterion approach Two expert solutions - combined Our solution is unique. Working with our energy expert partners SAVA, we offer an integrated combination of two immensely powerful, best of breed specialist business intelligence products which enable our clients to take a holistic approach to sustainability modelling, that fully addresses environmental, social & strategic, and economic factors. Delivering self-serve asset value rationalisation and option appraisal, with energy and commercial sustainability modelling. Key to demonstrating sound custodianship and intelligent investment decision making with demonstrable commitment to social and environmental factors. Contact us now to learn more: info@aspreysolutions.co.uk

A merger of Optivo and Southern Housing Group, to form Southern Housing has created one of the top five largest Housing Associations in England, managing around 77,000 homes and serving 167,000 residents across London, the South East, the Midlands and the Isle of Wight. Southern Housing has chosen Asprey’s AspireBI Solution to assist with the strategic management of its portfolio. AspireBI consultants provide a self-serve asset value rationalisation, option appraisal and sustainability model to enlighten strategic decision making and cement asset value consensus across an organisation. Resulting insights into optimising investments improves efficiency of decision-making with a reliable central knowledge source. AspireBI is supported by Asprey’s vast sector experience and finance and analytics expertise. Key to the purchase decision were the solution’s Microsoft power BI outputs that allow Southern Housing, already extensive MS BI users, to utilise Asprey’s model to support their continued business intelligence innovations. Dritan Uka, Director of Strategic Asset Management at Southern Housing stated: “It’s essential for us to make informed decisions using valuable data from a variety of sources. The Asprey model helps us to analyse large volumes of datasets and understand complex information in an efficient manner. This gives us a holistic view of the performance of our homes. It allows us to target investment so we can provide safe, sustainable and affordable homes for our residents.“

Founded as Croydon Churches Housing Association in 1967, we are a social housing provider with a focus on quality homes and excellent customer care. Managing over 1500 homes across 3 London Boroughs, Croydon, Sutton & Bromley. We provide a variety of homes including social housing, Shared Ownership and outright sales. ccha aspire to build more quality homes and continue to have a positive impact on the local communities in which we operate. When implementing AspireBI, and indeed since the original delivery in 2020, we have found the social housing business and investment appraisal knowledge of Asprey’s consultants to be invaluable. Key for us was our involvement in the construction of the initial model. Not only did it provide a forum for the Asset team to liaise with our Leadership team and agree organisational wide values based on our strategy, but it also identified where our data could be improved in order to provide a comprehensive consolidated model, that we utilise in our investment considerations, and offer a high level of decision confidence. In addition to being able to quickly and simply appraise our portfolio and model potential options, the main benefit for us was the ability to easily show visual results to senior management and board for their critique. We aspire to use AspireBI to produce data for our Annual Asset Management board reports. We have also recently completed a stock appraisal of our supported living units, this has assisted us in finalising our future strategy for this asset type. Wesley Flower, Asset Manager

Metropolitan Thames Valley Housing (MTVH) owns and manages 58,000 properties London, South East, East Midlands and East of England; providing affordable homes for rent, care & support and shared ownership for over 140,000 customers. MTVH was formed following the merger of Metropolitan Housing and Thames Valley Housing in 2018. Prior to the organisations merging, Thames Valley Housing had worked with Asprey to assess the performance of its property portfolio via the AspireBI platform to inform its Asset Management Strategy. Post-merger and with Metropolitan Housing not utilising a stock performance and option appraisal platform, Asprey were appointed to develop an Asset Appraisal Model to support in the delivery of the newly adopted Strategic Asset Management Plan. MTVH and Asprey have recently completed the second iteration of the Asset Appraisal Model which has become a integral resource for Development, Finance, Property and Compliance Teams across the MTVH business to support operational and strategic investment and divestment decisions. The AspireBI platform now provides a central source of income and expenditure information to assess the financial and strategic performance of properties (residential and non-residential) at individual, streets, estates, regions and group level. AspireBI is used to; · undertake all asset option appraisals to support investment or divestment decision · undertake bespoke appraisals on properties requiring major works, building safety or EPC upgrades · identify assets that require intervention as a result of falling outside of financial and strategic performance measures · provides a central source of asset data that supports the continued cleansing and improvement of data Guy Palmer, Development Director

Social Housing Business Intelligence Those involved in managing the performance of social housing organisations or their business streams understand the need for clear, precise, pertinent, and timely information. However, most are left using several disparate, unconnected business applications, and often isolated manual reports or spreadsheets to garner ‘reliable’ decision-support information, even with promises of clarity from ‘single solution’ software products. The social housing sector is currently awash with suppliers offering either an ‘all encompassing’ system with elements of business intelligence or generic BI solution providers offering to combat this issue. So having recognised the business need, how do you decide on the best supplier? Whilst many single solution offerings have reporting elements providing data analytics, they are expensive and take a long time to implement with massive organisation upheaval – even though they rarely use different data than existing legacy systems. Generic business intelligence solution providers probably have extremely good technical capabilities, but do they really understand this sector and your business needs? Self-service BI tools are available should you have the technical capacity to implement them, but by steering your business users into becoming immediate and ad-hoc data engineers, you can end up with a chaotic mix of metrics that vary across departments, run up big licensing bills, or breed confusion. AspreyBI - Asset Management and BI Experts – A sector focussed Partner With over twenty years experience providing innovative solutions and services to social landlords, Asprey understands their complex data and information needs. As early adopters of Microsoft’s BI technologies, we are keen evangelists of Big Data in housing and asset management and have built a reputation for delivering innovative Business Intelligence projects. Our BI projects look to mine better analytics and information from the asset management data within our own and third-party products, even legacy systems. Asprey’s work delivering Microsoft Power BI solutions, alongside Asprey’s unrivalled Asset Management expertise, allows us to offer Corporate Reporting from most available data sources. Our Corporate Reporting solutions collate useful data and information and provide comprehensive dashboards and insightful analytics, rapidly and economically, that even transform legacy system data repositories into rich providers of reliable management information. Asprey BI - A Sector Focussed Partner The Benefits Our corporate reporting solutions can help your organisation significantly improve the understanding of your business performance by assessing and mining existing data sources, without the expense and delay of IT system changes. We take complex sets of raw data and deliver visual BI dashboards and UIs that include our own analytics plus various filters and drill-down capability to further transform the data to help executives, managers, and staff to make better-informed decisions better-informed.

Regulatory compliance is an imperative for social landlords. From protecting tenant safety to maintaining the confidence of lenders and driving investment decisions, it is a major responsibility. Each social landlord may have different risks and risk levels to manage, but all are under increased scrutiny in the aftermath of Grenfell. Boards and Executives are ultimately responsible for health & safety and they must ensure their organisations understand the risks they face and have controls in place to mitigate them. With extensive, complex regulatory and best practise demands from gas, electric and other servicing needs, asbestos, fire risk, legionella and HHSRS, it’s hard to think of many instances where precise and prompt reporting and analytics is more vital at all levels of the organisation. Asprey Compliance is a cloud-based solution designed specifically for social housing landlords to support robust management, audit and improvement of these critical risk areas. It offers a comprehensive range of operational compliance management functions and delivers an organisation-wide ‘single version of the truth’. As well as managing operations and KPIs, Asprey’s interactive dashboards offer instant access to all macro and micro level data for complete performance transparency to provide assurance to Board and senior managers allowing them to: View and analyse the effectiveness of health & safety arrangements Help clearly evidence board ownership of health & safety performance Use data and information to improve decision making Clearly demonstrate excellent governance We have an established prestigious client base of housing associations, public sector organisation and charities across the UK. bpha’s compliance management required an easy-to-use solution, readily accessible insightful information across all compliance areas, administrative economies, and comprehensive risk management control. Asprey’s compliance suite, particularly the servicing and inspection function, certainly delivered on this. It’s a really powerful but simple to use and well-structured solution, which, at the touch of a button provides us with a simple live management view of our compliance status with the ability to drill into lower levels of information as needed. We can now view and report quickly, simply and consistently from a single source. As our sole system for managing all our servicing and inspection processes, it has not only improved reporting and clarity, but has reduced our admin burden and provided exceptional control features with its in-built automation, allowing us to achieve 99% automation on our gas servicing. I would highly recommend this solution to anyone looking to improve visibility and process control whilst reducing administration and reporting efforts. Paul Cook Director of Property Services and Compliance Intuitive and Economical Solution Asprey Compliance delivers: One Central online system for compliance management with effective co-ordination, evidence and control Simple consolidation of compliance planning, management and reporting - effortlessly Instant access to data and headline risk information Provision of the right information, at the right time, to the right people Rapid payback through transformational processes and data economies

In microeconomics, the theory of opportunity cost is a forward-looking concept of the economic value of the next best (or sometimes better) alternative that is foregone when another alternative is chosen. This economic cost is explicit and implicit and hence different to the accounting cost which is just the explicit cost to the organisation. Simply, it is the value sacrificed by the decision made at the time of the decision and beyond. In personal terms, if I buy a more expensive house, I may sacrifice the ability to buy an expensive car. I make the decision intuitively, but in business, intuition is an inadequate justification. This concept is used in corporate finance when appraising different investment opportunities and is easily overlooked as these are unseen costs that investment proposers may not highlight. By factoring in these opportunity costs, decision-makers can make better decisions as they have a clearer picture of the missed opportunities they are forgoing. Let’s take a look at an example for the social housing sector. A housing association has a group of void assets that, when let, will generate £50,000 per year of revenue. The options are to: Make no further investments in the group of assets and they will continue to generate £50,000 per year in real terms. Invest £350,000 and then generate £100,000 per year of revenue through remodelling. Over 10 years, the opportunity cost of choosing option 1 over option 2 is £50,000 and will increase for each year after as shown below. The gain over the opportunity cost is not great (at £50,000) but when the net present value of these costs (their value in today’s money at the outset) is factored in, the gain is much smaller and possibly not worthwhile. Understanding the opportunity cost of investments is key to making informed decisions and therefore should always be evaluated. Without doing so, opportunities can be missed and poor investment decisions can be made which may not stand up to scrutiny. Is opportunity cost a real cost? This is not well understood amongst some individuals as it is an “economic” cost, not an accounting cost and therefore is an “abstract” concept which does not show up on financial statements. However, ignoring it in the short term can have a substantial effect on the future performance of organisations and investors, as it is lost profits, so should not be ignored lightly. Why consider Opportunity Cost? Making investment decisions without evaluating their opportunity cost leads to suboptimal decision making. Calculating the NPV of investment options (alongside other financial and strategic yield and risk factors) and then evaluating the opportunity cost of those investments is an evidence-based approach to decision making, rather than leaving it solely to intuition or precedent, which are poor substitutes and can lead to costly mistakes in the long run.

From an FD’s viewpoint, setting asset management budgets (as with others) is heavily dependent on collective bargaining for resources from asset managers whose bias will be to seek more resources, and there is always a way to spend budgets. Confidence in budget needs is difficult to attain when disparities between the accounting lives of components (determined by stated accounting policies) and their actual lives (determined by quality of manufacture, servicing, installation, and tenant behaviour) can severely disturb reported profit expectations through less orderly component replacements. Unfortunately, asset management records and systems are largely forecasting tools that aim to predict and maintain condition standards of assets and, sensibly, use component lives that derive from actual average life and cost expectations based upon experience. The need to achieve scale economies with large works programmes further distorts component lives, sometimes even shortening them. There is a simple predictive tool that can mine component accounting data and related forecasts at asset level and calculate, using expected actual replacements in asset management systems, the related anticipated replacements and profits or losses on disposals for at least the next two years. This can be used for predicting depreciation adjustments recalibrating component accounting outputs in advance rather than taking unexpected I&E account adjustments every year or month. Unfortunately, even resolving this leaves an unhealthy divide between effective asset management and effective financial management, when budgets are spent intuitively rather than through an organisation-wide investment option appraisal and proposal methodology. It is becoming apparent to many landlords that asset management systems and finance budgets are inadequate for effective management of an asset portfolio. Historically, combining these with in-house and third-party consultants’ experience is a poor basis for sound custodianship. Without a soundly-based projection detailed to asset level, that is well utilised, maintained and shared centrally, the relative future net earnings value of each asset and the true opportunity costs of investment/divestment plans can often be down to guesswork, custom and bias. Additional bias is also introduced through investment justifications based upon ad hoc social and strategic factors without a structured rationale that has consensus in the organisation. Massive administrative effort would be required to establish day to day cost and revenue allocation in an accounting system down to asset level with any accuracy, but modern BI tools can mine electronic data and spreadsheet sources outside of the finance system to build sensible year zero and onward projections of net revenues at asset level. These can be reconciled to recent year TBs as a gross error check and calibration. Sources such as current rent roll, asset management planned & cyclical maintenance projections, recent years’ bad debts, voids and day to day maintenance records can provide asset level costs and revenue bases that can be extrapolated with logical forecasting algorithms. Asset registers and various analysis indexes from housing or asset management systems can be imported for reporting on the resulting projections and user defined inflation and discount factors applied. Within Asprey’s system, a sound methodology addresses the impact of social and strategic factors of import on investments or divestments and even identifies opportunity costs of competing investments in social and strategic terms, as well as financial terms. This completes the toolkit for an organisation wishing to properly manage the accretion of financial and strategic value in its underlying assets. Crucially, such a system bridges the gap between effective financial management and effective asset management and builds consensus across an organisation over asset values and investment prioritisation, not only within business streams but also at corporate portfolio level. As with any projection, its day to day use identifies improvements in data and in forecasting expertise, that in turn build continuous improvement into prudent management of the asset portfolio at all levels.

Peabody is one of the City’s oldest and largest social housing landlords, with 66,000 homes across London and the South East. Prior to introducing AspireBI, production and management of the strategic asset management plan involved collation of dispersed data and information. Compilation and detailed analysis to inform sensible investment options took vast amounts of administration time and management effort. Peabody’s group strategy identifies that in the sector’s uncertain climate it is important to have a clear focus and strategic direction. To support such efforts, Peabody embarked on embedding systems to enable more effective working, which includes the introduction of AspireBI. Aspire BI’s revolutionary consolidation approach gave Peabody an instantly accessible and multi-level single organisation-wide view of its housing stock. With easy-to-use and powerful data analytics features, Peabody can now quickly and simply appraise its stock to identify and model numerous investment strategies, utilising a consolidated central approach with an overall objective of ensuring social value from any investment made. In addition to a whole stock appraisal baseline, Peabody has specifically used AspireBI for: Appraising lease extensions. Identifying opportunity costs of refurbishments against other investment options. Identifying how achieving EPC targets is affecting the long-term financial plan. Easily identifying asset interventions and where investment is needed. The main benefits that Peabody has achieved through use of AspireBI are: Multiple admin time savings in collating relevant data before each intervention ( remodel, tenure change, void instance, etc). Management time savings in summation, investigation and review of information made available before decision-making and action proposals. Reduction of complexity and uncertainty from consolidating data from multiple systems and sources. Identification of investment opportunities aside from obvious strategies Post investment review and explanation time has been virtually eliminated because of the investment audit trail and standardised methodology that the model provides. Readily demonstrating sound custodianship to the regulator

We are all aware that we operate within a rapidly changing environment and that is unlikely to abate. To compete in the future environment there needs to be improvement in decision making, relating to both the decision and the speed at which decisions can be reached. For a social housing landlord, the housing portfolio generates and consumes a substantial amount of cash. Refining the planning and management of this spend demands more than a cost & revenue budget and more than one-off stock option appraisals. There are many long-standing organisations in this sector offering stock appraisal and investment option generation services, and indeed there is some perceived comfort in using these services, after all ‘no one ever got sacked for always buying IBM’, but does relying on third parties to repeatedly value and appraise your stock help you demonstrate proper custodianship? It is unlikely that an external party knows (or could learn quickly) more about your stock than your own people, and they would certainly know less than you if you could utilise a centralised and consistent decision support tool. Indeed, outsourcing such work is a substantial barrier to organisational learning and continuous improvement, which is critical to remain successful and be able to sensibly respond to the demands of such a volatile environment. In investment terms we are able to make better informed decisions when we all understand what drives costs (short, medium & long term) know when to spend understand where spend is needed know how spend impacts stock know who is impacting stock value know why cash or resources are being spent Using the right solution will help you understand the value drivers for your assets and allow you to model a wide range of options for ALL investment considerations. This level of organisational learning cannot be achieved when the learning takes place outside your organisation, even if using the same third party each time and particularly where (as is quite common) we move from one third party to another to provide these services. Having a commercially proven solution and centralised auditable methodologies in a sound data model not only eliminates expensive third-party dependency but also drives organisational learning and development, and sounder investments. Want to know more? Visit us at www.AspireBI.co.uk, email us at info@aspreysolutions.co.uk or call us on 01564 771600.

All organisations of significant size maintain forecasts; whether they be one year, five year or long-range projections. These can derive from historical actuals, collective bargaining for financial resources, incremental budget allocation or even simple allocation of available funds to operational activities. What can Asprey add to this seemingly comprehensive coverage? For a social landlord, the housing portfolio generates and consumes a substantial amount of cash. Refining the planning and management of this cash demands more than a budget for costs & revenues. I keep six honest serving men (They taught me all I knew) Their names are What and Where and When And How and Why and Who (Rudyard Kipling) It requires a more detailed understanding of the underlying drivers of costs and revenues i.e. the dynamics of condition, standards, investments, voids incidence & duration, planned maintenance, cyclical & day to day repairs. These expenses need to be commensurate with and assessed against rents, hopefully down to asset level. In addition to understanding and managing these drivers, the organisation’s strategic values must be furthered during these daily investment activities. Budgetary control alone will neither reveal nor optimise these activities. Our BI modelling and asset management experience combine to build asset level models of the housing portfolio down to the asset level. We do this by building a model around an imported register of assets and asset analysis types (age, structure, locations, bedrooms, purpose – any electronically held categorisation) and importing rents from the housing system, planned maintenance from the asset management system (sometimes spreadsheets), year zero estimates from analysed historical records of voids costs and losses, day to day repairs, cyclical repairs, etc, plus contracted investment and an overview of all data sources by our asset management specialists to ensure reliability of the model. Our model identifies the required investment to maintain the stock in its intended condition over its life. Whilst investment can be smoothed by budgeting, this would not reveal the underlying dynamics of an asset’s condition and cash needs, which are critical to each asset’s value compared to its peers. Only by capturing the costs and revenues that an asset creates, can its net revenue capability (or value) be assessed against its peers. Without this facility, expenditure is regularly being made without regard to its opportunity cost: a critical investment measure. In addition to financial levers of asset value and investment, our BI team assist with measuring the strategic values that should or do influence or drive investment in assets, business streams and portfolios. This much-abused area is simplified and together with all imported financial information, properly used, to remove its mystique and allow all parties responsible for the investment of cash or resources to understand its impact as clearly as financial values – value consensus across the organisation. All in all, Kipling’s poem resolves the asset investment questions that social housing stock custodianship poses, with the answers to What and Where and When, and How and Why and Who; the answers that create immediate payback for users of our BI products and services.