Community housing providers want detailed and reliable information to help them compare costs and performance with their peers.
House Keys, origainally developed by Q Shelter and Community Housing Industry Australia NSW (CHIA NSW, formerly NSW Federation of Housing Associations), are benchmarking tools, asked for by the industry. As well as enabling data-driven improvement, House Keys gives governments and lenders additional confidence in the industry.
A new iteration of House Keys was released in late 2023, helps Community Housing Organisations provide better services for tenants by understanding in detail where your services are working well and where there’s room for improvement, compared to similar organisations. It also helps demonstrate the performance of the sector overall and supports more effective advocacy.
Use the tools to:
- benchmark your organisation
- check you are providing value for money
- increase the quality of service to tenants
- highlight areas of high performance
- identify where you could make savings or improve customer service.
How can I get started with House Keys?
Download the House Keys Queensland Summary Sept 2024 document here.
Find out more information on the CHIA NSW website
If your community housing organisation has not yet subscribed to House Keys but wishes to participate, please contact Q Shelter via email
Getting the most from House Keys
Here are our top 5 suggestions about how your organisation can get the most out of House Keys:
- Include a summary of key data and rankings in your board reporting. Make sure it is analysed by a relevant peer group.
- Prepare a summary for senior management and staff.
- Prepare a summary of results for tenants and discuss the results in more detail with your tenants’ advisory group.
- Include improvement areas into next year’s Operations Plan.
- Discuss the sectors’ results at a network meeting with your peers – for example with CFOs, middle managers or asset and development managers.
