Craig Stirrat

I recently attended a digital and innovation event which made me reflect on the expression - The more things change, the more they stay the same. In other words, despite apparent changes or advancements in the housing sector, certain fundamental aspects or patterns remain unchanged over time – and for us, its fundamentally meeting the needs of our customers - the tenants.

Tenant satisfaction - are we comparing ourselves with the right sector?

When considering who to choose as their landlord or how well a landlord delivers its services - do tenants compare their landlord with other landlords? I suspect most tenants are more likely to compare the social housing sector with other business service providers or what they’ve been told by friends and family.

Naturally, as social landlords, we are always keen to compare ourselves with others in our (equivalent football) league or occasionally sector benchmark leagues with the aim to learn from each other to understand how we may improve our performance outcomes and rise up the league.

But as consumers - which service organisations would come to mind when deciding on who to choose to buy services from? – possibly those organisations who consistently maintained high satisfaction levels over the past 5 years? - e.g. Nationwide, Jet2Holidays or Greggs may come to mind.

I ponder on these questions ahead of the imminent release of the Scottish Housing Regulators report on charter outcomes for 2023/24 and in particular I question the value of asking tenants how satisfied they are with their landlord.

The purpose of the Charter is to focus the efforts of social landlords on achieving outcomes that matter to their customers.

I suspect that across the social rented sector, that the average satisfaction level will remain relatively as high as in the previous year (2022/23), which was 87%.

So, job done! …. Or is it?

For instance, Housemark’s benchmarking analysis of English social landlords in June (Tenant Satisfaction Measures) revealed a decrease in overall satisfaction from 85.1% in 2018-19 to 69.4% in 2023-24, a drop of over 15 percentage points.

According to the UK Customer Satisfaction Index for July 2026, “…over 60% of customers believe the reputation of an entire sector can be tarnished by the bad practices or the behaviours of a small number of companies” – so perhaps it is no surprise that down south that average satisfaction levels have dropped given the widespread negative media coverage of sector service failures.

Furthermore, survey professionals such as HouseMark would suggest that the satisfaction levels difference between social landlords can often be attributed to survey bias (method of survey, sample size, age of occupant, house type and geographical location).

These survey biases can combine to have a bigger effect. For instance, a small rural landlord carrying out a face-to-face survey achieved 95% overall satisfaction levels. Whereas a London Borough carrying out their survey online received 38%

It will may therefore come as no surprise that the last Scottish Household survey (2022) revealed that there were differing satisfaction outcomes between housing tenures, with

1. 95% of owner occupier households being either very or fairly satisfied with their housing,
2. compared to 88% of households in the private rented sector and
3. 79% of households in social rented homes.

Why would this satisfaction outcome for the social rented sector be substantially lower than other tenures, when arguably there are in most cases higher housing standards and greater affordability to be found in the social rented sector?

According to Don Porter, CBE, Co-Founder of MSB - “Customers don’t expect you to be perfect. They do expect you to fix things when they go wrong.”

The latest UK Customer Satisfaction Index reports that overall customer satisfaction in the private sector is positively affected by perception that those organisations that are doing the right thing in business and felt that the organisation understood and cared for their personal situation and needs influence their levels of satisfaction.

Many commentators will remark that given tenants often have no choice who their landlord is or have (despite Charter outcomes) little influence on the standard and quality of service delivery, that measuring tenant satisfaction annually achieves very little in terms of continually improving services.

But it is clear tenants are no longer passive consumers. We cannot ignore that the consumer experience of tenants with the private sector has established the age of the internet-savvy consumer, and not surprisingly, experience in the private sector has revealed that smart consumers are on the rise.

With all the information available literally at the tips of their fingers, consumers in particular Generation Z (aged 18+) are increasingly engaging in product comparisons to make their purchase decisions.

Therefore, its time that social landlords engage more with various search engines and vertical search engines - because tomorrow’s Generation Z tenant is already of the age to be entitled to apply for a social tenancy and yet many will seek accommodation from the private sector first.

For instance – a quick Google search of Trust Pilot – I found very few reviews of housing associations and of those I found – they all appeared to be in England.

So, like any business owner, social landlords now need to, more than ever, understand these various consumer comparison habits so that they can strategise to improve the perception of the sector to increase visibility with householders/consumers who are actively searching for a tenure of choice that offers quality and affordability.

The social rented sector has a lot to be proud of and many social landlords will indeed be able to demonstrate high levels of tenant satisfaction, but equally, if HouseMark’s assessment and the results of the Scottish Household Survey are representative – many landlords are clearly not keeping apace of tenant expectations. In my view, the old adage applies that we can’t keep doing the same things and expect a different outcome – time for some disruption in the sector - as Ian Wright of Disruptors Innovators Network always quotes: “What got us here won’t get us there…”.