2022 has been a really busy year for the team at YourPlace Housing.
As I’ve mentioned in previous newsletters, we’ve been working hard on our new redevelopment program, which is now well and truly underway. This program isn’t just important for building new properties but is also essential for our ongoing viability as we seek to reduce future maintenance costs of older dwellings. There is more on this later in this newsletter.
There is a price to this sort of progress, particularly for our tenants who are living in properties being sold or redeveloped. Our team will continue to work hard to find suitable alternative housing for people who need it, and while there is still some work to do, we are pleased that a number of tenants have been successfully relocated during the year. One such tenant is Rose, who shares her story in this newsletter.
During the year, we moved our office to the Adelaide CBD where we are now far more accessible to tenants and closer to many of our key stakeholders. We now have professional meeting spaces, and a kitchen area for more informal meetings and events. In September, we hosted our valued maintenance contractors to talk through some of our plans in that space.
During the year we also did some work meeting with tenants to try to understand how we could improve our services including maintenance. It was this feedback that led us to review how we managed maintenance and make the difficult decision to redesign some of our roles. As a result, we bid farewell to Gary Wolstencroft, Jenni Christie and Serina Dilena who had been with our organisation for many years. We sincerely thank them for their contribution and commitment to YourPlace and our tenants.
With our new structure in place, and a new skill set among our staff, we will be engaging more with our tenants and contractors to improve delivery of our maintenance services with a greater focus on preventative maintenance. This is especially relevant in the context of increased costs of materials and labour due to broader economic factors in the construction sector.
It would be remiss of me to not mention COVID, which significantly impacted the service we provided over the last twelve months. With the easing of restrictions, we were very pleased to ramp up our home visits and property inspections and be once again meeting face-to-face with you all!
We have also welcomed five new staff members in the past 12 months – Melissa Thredgold in Tenancy Services, Katharine Miller and Paula McKenzie in Corporate, and Skyy Harrington and Chantal Crawford in Assets. They have all have thrown themselves into their work, and I thank them for choosing YourPlace!
We look forward to the coming year and the opportunities it will present.
Geoff Slack
CEO
Office closing time over the Christmas and New Year period:
YourPlace Housing will be closed from Saturday 24 December 2022 and will reopen on Tuesday 3 January 2023.
If you have any urgent maintenance issues, please call the office number, 8351 8466 and the call will divert to our after hours service ‘CALL CONNECT’.
What’s Happening at YourPlace:
December 2022 Edition
