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Hopefully a few of your questions answered by Gaz.
Housingnet started life as a one page website of Housing Association information when I was grounded from my previous job working for a Social Housing Maintenance company. After one back operation too many I was told to take a more sedentary job. A sedentary job!? Are you having a laugh!?
I've been a page boy in a hotel, worked in Harrods florist, joined the Army as a mechanic, became a diving instructor, worked on boats in the Pacific, opened a dive school in New Zealand, became a travel agent in Auckland, nearly joined a circus in Queensland, sold perfume on the streets of Sydney, Perth, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Las Vegas. Made the best Mont Blanc fake pens in LA during the earthquake, became a maintenance man, manufactured Neoprene bath mats and ran a market stall selling then, ceramics, and old British Comics in Frames in London and Liverpool.
I don't do sedentary! Or at least I didn't until then.
So in 1997 I decided that my future lay in computing and the Internet although I hadn't actually sat at one by this point. I borrowed the money, bought the computer and turned it on ....
Admittedly in the first hour I was fairly disillusioned as I'd found Windows 'Paint' and managed to get a square shape on the screen fill it with red and then scribbled over it with the eraser but very little else. It wasn't long though before my brain started thinking about the possibilities of the Internet and my new career had started.
If you were around back then you would remember 'Bobs Open Door' an industry website watch site. Bob had this to say about us:
"Housingnet has a fantastic amount of information on all types of housing contacts. Still can't quite make up my mind who it is for."
Bob was quite true, I didn't have the money to build what I wanted to build so I just had to keep building up trust and visitors - it's now known as Stealth Marketing it but I just called it necessity.
The aim is to get at least one registered user from all the Housing Associations in the UK and the quickest way to do this is to give registration away for free. Housing Associations are the user group we are really reaching out to but Local Authority people seem like a nice bunch and they use Housingnet extensively for research so we are happy to give them free registration as well. We work equally hard in keeping their data up-to-date so everyone can find useful information.
Registration is free to you, we offer licenses that last for a year and whenever we decide to charge for this service the decision to renew will be entirely up to you.
The only way you would ever consider buying licenses from us is if you thought the service was going to be useful enough and that is our quest.
- Honestly, it is free to anyone with an e-mail address matching the registered e-mail address we have on our database in the Housing Association or LA sections. Your e-mail address could be 'catflap@shephardha.org.uk' and if we have a registered e-mail for Shepard HA as 'anything@shephardha.org.uk' and you can access mail sent to 'catflap' you will be let in to Access.
- Once you fill in your e-mail address on 'Access' you will automatically be sent a link like this to the e-mail address you gave:
Hello Gaz,
Please use the following link to Access on Housingnet.
http://www.housingnet.co.uk/access.php?rslid=3451&random_no=718666843
Kind Regards
Housingnet Admin
- Click on the link and you have access into our system from where you can add,edit or amend any of the data we hold on your organisation, it's subsidiaries, area offices and any attached organisation in a group structure and register on Housingnet for free. From Access you can also add Jobs and News directly on to the site. We welcome any interesting content.
The Free Registration page in Access looks like this:
You will notice that there are no payment options on this registration, that's because it is completely Free.
We do not get involved in this process in anyway as everything is automatic
- Registration to our system gives you access to all the data on Housingnet and the Export tools to enable you to download this data to your desktop.
So what are we building?
All the clues are on this page but if I said anymore it would spoil the surprise. All we would like you to remember is that we know our business and we also know an area of your business probably better than anyone else in the UK. As much as we enjoy our work we are looking for financial remuneration and to do that we have to build you something you want to buy better than anyone else can. Fortunately we are quietly confident we can do that.
So far this is what we have for you:
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The most up-to-date and comprehensive Housing Association and Local Authority contact data available in any medium in the UK and the ability to export any of the data based on certain criteria which you can view here. The datafile produced can be opened in MS Word, Excel or merged with your current database.
- Housing Stock data on
virtually all Housing Associations in the UK that can be viewed by area and management organisation. We call this Social Housing Mapping and this is the first time ever this data has been available in this form.
To make our Social Housing Mapping project work we need your help in suppling us with your latest stock figures.
The figures can be added in Access or sent directly to Zarine who will add them for you.
Many Housing Associations just send us their latest RSR and we can update our system from those figures.
- Post Jobs and News for free on Housingnet. We have around 130,000 unique visitors to the site every month and they are staying to look at 3 - 4 pages each. Housingnet is not only a great medium to advertise on but it's also extremely cost effective as we don't charge you a bean.
In 1999 I realised that it was going to be a long time before I was able to pay UK rates to get my projects built so I looked a little further afield and ended up in Nagpur, India. India's City of Oranges! Since then I have been building a great team headed by Ajay the Office Manager and we now employ 25 staff in India, a small team of programmers in China and a desinger from Serbia so we feel we are heading in the right direction.
We enjoy what we do and really believe in the products and services we offer. We do sell the data we collect to private companies but so do a lot of other people and we always say that if a company specifically wants to target you they really do feel that they have something of interest to offer. They also pay my staff wages bill and enable us to carry on building Housingnet and for that I am extremely grateful.
We hope you can join us as it's been fun up to now and things are just about to get a whole lot more exciting.
Please remember that first and foremost our company Com1 UK builds software and runs IT systems for various clients on 4 continents. If you would like to use us for any IT related work then please get in touch.
Thank-you for your interest.
Please do not hesitate to contact us for any further information.
Gaz Summer
gaz.summer [at] com1uk.com
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