A quick round-up of Housingnet activity over the past month.

Banners again

I bang on all the time about banners and I don’t really get why some people don’t send them in. We are now also showing your banners on Housingnet to our HA & LA users – over 2000 have subscribed so far. On average each banner was being shown 455 times last month on the website alone.
The banner dimensions for web and mobile are:
660 x 150px
300 x 250px

They look like this on Housingnet News

Universal Map

Universal Map – New Business This has been awhile coming but it’s finally launched. ‘New Business’ is a new section on the Universal Map which enables clients to display the stock they are contracted to work on shown as a heatmap and then the ability to add the stock markers of up to 3 further Housing Organisations so you can see if you are already working in their area. You can then overlay this data with store locations of the main materials suppliers such as Jewson and Travis Perkins.

But let’s start with something simpler, a client asked this yesterday …..

“I need a map of a prospective clients stock and want to show our office locations“

Open the map

Select ‘New Business’

Open Select Contractor and search for your company. – This will load the map with the stock owned by the organisations you work with and the contracts we have you working on.

You can turn off ‘Contract Markers’ and ‘Heatmap in the Select Map Feature section.

Now search for up to 3 organisations to display their stock on the map.

If we don’t have all your area offices please send them.

View a Blog on all the Universal Map features here.

Tender Alert Email

You hopefully noticed that we started sending out the daily tenders by email again today. We want you to use BIOD as this is a better system but realise that some of you are still using Tenders Direct and we need to stop this as it’s wasted money.

The new ‘Bulletin’ has Tenders, CANs, Minutes and News and although this week we are sending everything out each day we are moving our email server so we can send information based on your settings in the very near future.

Search

You might have noticed we have changed the search results section so you can link to the relevant page quicker. The ‘Name’ will take you to the ‘Overview’ and the icons open ‘Housing, Finance, Stock Map, News, Tenders & Contracts, Analysis Graphs and the PrintOut.

League Tables

View League Tables

Planning Stats – Top 10 Cities

Download the full table

The Universal Map combines our Housing and Contracts Map so we can create a one stop shop for all our mapping projects. It also includes new functionality and data that you won’t have seen before. Excited? I bet you are. We’ve added screen shots below to walk you through it.

The Universal Map can be accessed if you are a Premium client or a Free HA / LA user who has kindly agreed for us to display your name and Job Title on Housingnet. If you have a free registration but can’t view the map please change your opt-in settings from the Dashboard.

We also made an excruciatingly dull ‘How to’ video to give you an overview of the map features but since then we added the ‘New Business’ section so we’ll update it soon.

Mapping Housing Stock

Mapped Land Registry Title Data for Social Housing in England & Wales. Select anywhere on the map to zoom in to the Ward to display all stock. Show the stock by Ward, 1 & 5 mile radius or Local Authority.

Highlighting Stock

In the left panel select the figure in the Ward column to highlight the stock owned by the corresponding organisation. All other markers owned by other organisations will change to grey

Property Data Details

Click a purple stock marker to view the Street View, property information and EPC details (where available).

Show Organisations based on Name or Location

Search for an organisations name or an area at the top of the panel to display to display results on the map. For Location search click on the marker to load the Land Registry Title Data.

Selected Organisations

When an individual organisation is selected the stock markers displayed will be colour coded to represent the type of Title as shown in the Legend.

Organisation data in the left panel includes Address, Parent / Subsidiary info, Housing Stock overview and key metric graphs.

Search Contracts

Search contracts based on the type of work which we break down into ‘Trades’. Contracts are displayed in a ‘traffic light’ colour scheme relating to their expiry date.

Search Contracts Options

Contracts can be displayed based on Expiry, Satisfaction Ratings or by Contract Winner.

Select Contractor

Search for a Contractor to show office locations and the contracts they are involved in.

Selected Contract Details

Hover over the contract marker for an overview of the contract details and click to view the Contract Award Notice and display the related housing stock.

New Business

In this example Liberty Group clients stock is shown as a heat map

New Business : Stock Overlay

You can overlay the heatmap with stock markers from up to 3 target clients – Great Places has been selected as an example

New Business : Merchant Store Locations

Flood Alert and Green Belt

View properties in Green Belt and Flood Plain areas.

As always get in touch if you get stuck.

Our Premium Tender Alert and News Service is called Business Intelligence On-Demand and works particularly well on mobiles. This is how you access it …..

Open www.housingnet.co.uk on your mobile phone.

To add a Housingnet icon to your Home Screen read this:
https://www.howtogeek.com/196087/how-to-add-websites-to-the-home-screen-on-any-smartphone-or-tablet/

Sign in from the Menu. The Menu icon will change from green to white. BIOD is the landing page where we include Daily Tenders, Contract Award Notices, Minutes & a daily News roundup.

The mobile version of BIOD will show the same information you have set up on the desktop.

You can also change the settings by clicking on the green settings icon.

The same for Contract Award Notices

Minutes are included and you can change the settings to only see Minutes from your areas of interest and the Type of content.

People really like our news service and we go the extra mile with Construction & Maintenance and Planning & Regeneration. Again, just remove the news topics you don’t want to see from the settings.

Click on any Housing Association or Local Authority listed in the contract data to view their details.

We’re here if you need a hand.

Welcome to the August edition of the Housingnet Update.

Stop buying Tenders Direct (or any other tender service)!

If you still have a Tenders Direct, Contracts Advance or similar tender alert service please cancel it as our Business Intelligence On-Demand Service has been put to the test against them many times and we always come out top. They just can’t put the level of detail into the process that we can as they are servicing every sector and we specialise in Repairs, Maintenance, Construction & affiliated trades and services.

Building Types on Current Tenders

On the subject of BIOD we’ve added the ability to sort current tenders by building type.  If you’re insanely bored or need a BIOD walk-through I made a video of the BIOD settings process. There is also a previous Blog post about it.

Printouts

These seem to be topical at the moment so just a reminder that you can print off (or Print to PDF) all the most relevant data we think you could use on each organisation. The Printout tab is at the far end of the row of tabs ie. Housing, Finance etc. on every organisations page.

Here is an example for Metropolitan

 We are the League!

The July League Tables are out.

Universal Map

We have a number of mapping projects on the go so we needed some way of combining everything hence the Universal Map. It ties together the housing and the contract map in an intuitive way. I use that term loosely as this is definitely a project we will be finessing for some time. What’s that I hear you cry? “Gaz make us another one of your great videos to showcase what an amazing map platform your team has built!” – OK you lucky people, here it is.

We are here to help in anyway we can.

Thank you for opting in to our requests for GDPR. We do appreciate it and have built you this as a way to read our daily Housingnet News online.

We offer free registration to Housingnet for all Housing Associations and Local Authority employees but you need to agree to our request to show your name and job title (if required) to access the new version of Housingnet News online. Click here to register.

If you log on to Housingnet or click here if you’re already logged in from your computer or mobile you will see a link to the news on your Dashboard and in the Menu under ‘News & Information’. As well as being able to access all the usual news categories we have also added data sections under Business, Housing, Maintenance and Planning with more to follow.

Now we have Housingnet News online we can give you more control over the news you see. The ‘green cog’ opens the settings panel and from here you can add and remove news categories. If Planning is your thing you can also add and remove Regions of interest – a lot of the Planning news is submitted with a postcode.

To give the news a bit more bite we started adding links to pages on Housingnet and on this new online version we’ve also started adding data sections that contain information recently submitted to our system. In the Business section we give an overview of the Financial Return as they are released and a comparison table showing the difference, so far, to last years results. 

You might not know it but we have a strong interest in Repairs, Maintenance & Construction and supply monthly league tables to Construction News – we’ll add them to the Maintenance section when they come out each month. Our R&M, Construction & Planning news and accompanying data sets are a must read for anyone involved in this sector so please spread the word to your teams.

Please let us know if you have any questions or require help in registering / opting-in.

We were concerned that some clients were still checking tender emails each day from sources other than Housingnet. You don’t need to do this as we have a team of six doing that for you and we spend a lot more time organising them. The system we have built will replace the daily Bulletin as email is not the best delivery method for this type of content. We hope you like what we’ve built and, as always, we welcome your feedback.

Get started with the new BIOD system

Settings – There are four ‘Settings’ panels – Current Tenders – select Regions and Trades Contract Award Notices – select Regions and Trades Minutes – select Regions and Topics News – select Regions and News Categories Click on the settings icon in each section to save your choices. The selections that you make here will be reflected on all ‘contract’ searches throughout the site.

Select the table icon to link to the main Current Tenders and Contract Award Tables

Tenders and Contracts in a darker font are the latest to be posted.

‘View More’ will take you to the respective table to view older Tenders, Contracts and Minutes

Local Authority, and sometimes Housing Association, Minutes can make for very useful insights. We search all Minutes looking for information we think might be relevant to you.

BIOD works on your mobile as well. Revisit this old blog post to see how to add a Housingnet icon to your mobile home screen and here to learn more about the mobile version.

Welcome to BIOD from Housingnet

Please send any questions and queries to helpdesk@housingnet.co.uk

The Gender Pay Gap reporting deadline was last night so we’ve compiled tables for Housing Associations and Local Authorities. If you have a Housingnet Licence and are signed in you can link to the full tables here:
Housing Associations
Local Authorities

Housing & Care 21 have the unenviable position of coming top so far in the HA table with a mean and median difference between the pay of women and men of 36% and 28% respectively. This means that women’s mean hourly rate is 36% less than men and a median rate of 28% less but this would most probably be due to the various types of job role within the organisation.
Glasgow Housing Association have the lowest minus (-) figures meaning that women are paid a mean hourly rate of 25% higher than men. The most even handed Housing Association is Choices who report no difference in their mean or median pay.

Overall companies in the UK have reported a 9.8% median pay gap in favour of men with construction having the largest average difference by sector.

Housingnet registration is free to all Housing Association and Local Authority people.

* Hourly rate mean and median figures are positive when female hourly rates are lower than men.

The mean hourly rate is the average hourly wage across the entire organisation so the mean gender pay gap is a measure of the difference between women’s mean hourly wage and men’s mean hourly wage.
The median hourly rate is calculated by ranking all employees from the highest paid to the lowest paid, and taking the hourly wage of the person in the middle; so the median gender pay gap is the difference between women’s median hourly wage (the middle paid woman) and men’s median hourly wage (the middle paid man).

Housing Associations
Local Authorities

1. The League Tables are out for January and we have completed our first full year so we can start to compare month & year to date. A new ‘Construction’ table has been added.
https://housingnet.co.uk/contractor_league_analysis/rr/jan/2018

2. Expiring Contracts – we’ve added Stock, Repairs Satisfaction, Gas Servicing %, R&M Cost per Home, Planned Works Expenditure (previous year), links to Analysis metrics and related news.

https://data.housingnet.co.uk/master/tender/expiring_contracts

3. All new Planning Applications relating to New Build are being added to the system in readiness for the launch of our ‘Development Opportunities’ section in March.
https://data.housingnet.co.uk/master/portal/planning/

All Brownfield registers are currently being uploaded and will be available by the end of February.

4. Market share analysis will be updated in March and then quarterly after that.

5. You all currently receive an advertising package from us worth £5000 and we are just about to ramp that up. Please hand us over to your marketing departments so we can show them the advertising opportunities we offer as part of your licence fee.

6. And lastly please remember that we have six people monitoring all daily tenders and tend to get them out quicker than the competition. We’ve not missed a tender yet so you can feel confident in using this service. Saved Tender searches can be viewed on the Current Tenders table and in the ‘Business Intelligence On Demand ’ service. You can access both from the main site Menu or on your phones at www.housingnet.co.uk – (https://www.housingnet.co.uk/blog/how-to-add-a-housingnet-quick-launch-icon-to-your-mobile-or-tablet/).

Set up your Tender preferences here: https://housingnet.co.uk/login/accountdetails

We have a lot going on at the moment but still welcome suggestions. We’re thinking about building a housing stock heatmap so you could select the stock you’re working on or are interested in and it would appear on the map as a heatmap. You could then overlay that with the stock markers for another HA/LA so you could see how easily, or not, it would be to cover the contract.

This visualisation is showing multiple organisations stock as a heat map, overlaid with Guinness Partnership stock and Jewson stores. You can show/hide the Jewson markers from the icon on the right hand side.
https://www.housingnet.co.uk/map/mapping/guinness/heatmap/

And this is a visualisation we built for Housing Associations which is looking at outlying stock and potential partners to swap stock with.
https://www.housingnet.co.uk/custom_map/stock_rationalisation_part2
Click on the purple marker then select Knightstone from the box that opens.

We’re here if you need us.

Hello, thank you for dropping by.

Sadly after displaying free Housing Association details on the web for the past 20 years the time has come for us to build our own wall.

We now very specifically target Contractors, Suppliers and various other companies working in the Housing sector and no longer provide, what we have always called, ‘marketing data’. Previously we would allow visitors a snap shot of the information we hold to entice them to buy from us but for the past 20 years we have spent a lot of time dealing with enquiries from the general public either thinking we were a housing association or requesting advice and information about housing.

Click here to find out more about what we do, the licences we sell and how to register.

If you are already registered, please login.

Unfortunately the time has come for us to close off access to the address data and our news so we can concentrate on our core product. If you followed a link from a Google search to get here this will take time to be removed but we have done all we can to speed up this process to minimise the inconvenience.

For all housing enquiries it is always best to contact your Local Authority which you can locate here.

How to find information on Housingnet relating to companies, the contracts they are, or have been, involved in, contract location, Contract Registers and Expenditure Sheets.

1. Using the Search Bar
2. Contracts Map
3. Contracts & Tenders Portal
4. Company / Competitor Search

 
Using the Search Bar

Name Search for company contact, people and financial data from the ‘Search’ link in the header (top) bar.

The other search icons in the header relate to People, an A-Z director of organisations, the Land Registry Title Search, News and on the far right side, Reports in the Housingnet Library.

Every organisation we collect data on will have dedicated pages of information which you can access from the tabs at the top of the page.

 
Contracts Map
Click on the ‘Map’ tab in the image above and then select the yellow ‘View the Contracts Map’ at the top of the page.
Menu > Maps > Contract Map - Select the company from the tab on the right hand side of the map.

The contracts are colour coded according to the expiry timeframe:

Red – Less than 12 months remaining
Amber – Less than 2 years remaining
Green – More than 2 years remaining
Blue – Direct Labour Organisations (DLOs)

 
Contracts & Tenders Portal
Menu > Search > Tenders & Contracts

Every PIN, Contract Notice and Contract Award Notice on Housingnet can be found in the ‘Contracts & Tenders Portal’. Type in the name of the company and select ‘Winner’ from the search drop down.

 
Company / Competitor Search
Menu > Search > Company/Competitor
Menu > Dashboard > Dashboard

Search by Company (or Keyword such as ‘modular’ or ‘boiler’) from the search box on the Dashboard or in the Business Intelligence section of the Data Bank.

High & Low Value Contracts

There are 3 sections in the Company / Competitor section:

1. High & Low Value Contracts
2. Contract Register
3. Expenditure

The first page of results will display a list of all ‘High & Low Value Contract Winners’ containing the search term you used. Either select the companies of interest to you from the list individually or ‘Check All’ to select everything. Click on the ‘Fetch Data’ button.

All current and expired contracts are displayed in the results. Uncheck the ‘Display archived results’ tick box to remove the expired contracts. Total Contract Value from the CAN is displayed alongside the number of Framework contracts that are listed.

As with all these tables the results can be exported to a spreadsheet.

Contract Register

Every local authority maintains a corporate register of contracts intended to provide schedules of contracts for keeping track of an agency’s contracts and financial commitments with its suppliers; and contract statuses which can be used by public organisations to provide transparency.

Expenditure

The Expenditure sheets are useful for suppliers to see which Local Authority is buying from your competitors and the value of the purchases.

Expenditure over £250 provides information of payments made by the Council to its suppliers in excess of £250 to increase openness and transparency.

As always we are on hand to help and to export any data requests. If you have any questions, comments or queries please write to us – helpdesk@housingnet.co.uk