Tenancy and Estate Management Team

The Tenancy and Estate Management team is made up of the Estate Wardens, Tenancy Management team and Mediation team.

What is Tenancy and Estate Management?

Estate Management is a term used to describe a wide range of services relating to the management of housing areas. Any matter, which can impact upon a tenant's enjoyment of their home or environment in which they live, can be described as an Tenancy and Estate Management issue.

We are here to help, and we want to encourage tenants to make suggestions and put forward ideas.

Our team deals with ...

Estate walkabouts

We carry out estate walkabouts of council estates with elected members, tenants' groups, tenants and residents on a regular basis.

By walking each route officers have the opportunity to check that the area complies with our Estate Management Standards, and issue repairs as required.

Feedback received from tenants and elected members on estate walkabouts has all been positive. They are happy with the format of the walkabouts and find the inspections to be informative and useful.

Staff feel enabled to meet in person the local members and tenants for their areas and the inspections help to lay the foundations for building good relationships with them.

Issues identified from the estate inspections are taken forward by the relevant team or department. Outcomes achieved are fed back to Councillors and Tenants' Groups.

Our walkabouts for 2011 have now been completed. Details of walkabouts to be carried out in 2012 will be posted in our Events Diary early in the new year.

Close inspections

We monitor and inspect closes, arranging cleaning rotas and clean ups.

We also check the door entry systems and arrange for repairs when required.

Tenants living in Council flats are responsible for maintaining cleanliness standards in their close/stair. Please see our Council close cleanliness standards web page for more information.

Garden inspections

We need to check that tenants' gardens don't become overgrown or littered with refuse. With over 5000 properties we get round them all eventually, but if you see an overgrown garden or have concerns about a tenant not disposing of refuse correctly, please contact us. One of the best sources of information we have is our tenants.

Abandoned property monitoring and recovery

It can be frustrating if you know that a property is empty and it appears that the council are doing nothing about it. However, the process for recovering properties can be lengthy, so if you believe a property is unoccupied and think we don't know about it please let us know. We will look into it as quickly as possible.

New Tenant Visits

We need to see if our new tenants have settled in and discuss any problems being experienced in their new home with the aim of resolving them.

The team are also going to undertake some proactive work in Tenancy Sustainment, which will involve us tracking the progress of a new tenant for the first year. This will give us the opportunity to gain some valuable customer feedback and hopefully highlight tenancies which require support. This will also enable our tenants to become familiar with the housing staff for their area and have confidence in reporting any problems to us at the earliest opportunity.

Dealing with Neighbour Nuisance

We promote mediation services and deal with tenants who act anti-socially. We prefer to try and resolve a situation without taking legal action, but we won't hesitate to act if a tenant refuses to moderate their behaviour.

The Council can apply for an anti-social behaviour order or even seek an order to repossess the home. This can be a time consuming process as it involves going through the courts.

The biggest difficulty we face when dealing with neighbour nuisance is proving that anti-social behaviour is happening. This is where witnesses, the Police and other agencies can help us take action by backing up your complaint.

It is Council policy not to disclose the identity of the complainer. In cases where we think the person being complained about may be able to identify the complainer, we discuss this first and proceed with our investigations only when the complainer is comfortable with the situation.

Dealing with boundary disputes

Sometimes it is not clear which tenant is responsible for what bit of land! Its our team that need to sort this out, often with help from our partners in legal services.

How we learn from good practice

We are constantly trying to improve the service we give to tenants. Since October 2009, when Anti-Social Behaviour (ASB) procedures were introduced by the Tenancy Management Team, we have strived to improve the way we work.

In May 2011 we reviewed our ASB procedures again, which has created a more streamlined process to make the best use of the ASB tools we have at our disposal, like the 'Good Neighbour Agreement', which was used by Falkirk Council or the 'Acceptable Behaviour Agreement'. Since using these interventions we have continued to see a 15% reduction in the turnaround time for dealing with anti-social behaviour cases.

If you would like further information on this, please contact the Tenancy and Estate Management Team.