Up-to-date stock condition data is fundamental to meeting safety and quality standards in the housing sector. But registered providers need to do more than just collect data – they need to analyse and apply it too, say Mark Astbury, Kevin Hartshorn, Matthew Stringer and Yusuf Siddiqui at Ridge.

Stock condition data is set to be one of the hottest talking points at Housing Community Summit in Liverpool in September. Poor or non-existent data has been repeatedly identified as a root cause of the sector’s failures on safety and quality. Addressing this is one of the key aims of the inspection regime introduced after Grenfell and it will be fundamental to compliance with Awaab’s Law, which comes into force in October.

The Regulator of Social Housing has made it clear that landlords must continue to improve their understanding of their stock – noting in a focus report published in July 2025 that almost three-quarters of C3 or C4 consumer gradings were partly attributed to low survey coverage, or the landlord’s failure to demonstrate they understood the condition of tenants’ homes.

This distinction reflects our view at Ridge – that establishing a rolling programme of inspections is only the first step, and that collecting data is not the same as understanding it.

Here’s what we’ve learned about making the leap from stock condition surveys to effective asset management.

 

21st century problems need 21st century solutions

As an affordable housing consultancy, we’ve been carrying out stock condition surveys for 25 years, since the days of housing stock options appraisals that informed the future ownership and maintenance of council housing. Over that time, the technologies available for collecting, processing and storing data have advanced dramatically. We’re no longer sending surveyors out armed only with clipboards. We’re using tablets, GIS platforms, thermal imaging, drones and photogrammetry to gather information, and machine learning and AI to analyse it. This is revolutionising what we can learn about tenants’ homes, and how we can improve them.

 

Data is only useful if you analyse it

Often we find clients have ticked the box on data collection, but then they don’t do anything with it, beyond inputting it into a database. The essential next step is to develop it to inform business planning, asset performance modelling to determine net present value, and better investment decisions. Over the years, our team has expanded to include data specialists who are purely focused on validating information, asset performance and identifying trends. For example, where the same repairs occur repeatedly in different flats in the same block, trend analysis can flag that up, indicating a hidden problem. If several properties suffer from damp and mould, there may be a leak tracking down through the building. Flat-by-flat repairs will never get to the root cause, but data analysis can.

Other drivers also need to be considered, including landlord compliance, the retrofitting push, and condensation, damp and mould, all of which will impact future reinvestment.

 

Not all data is good data

The Regulator’s report highlighted continuing improvements in stock condition coverage: on average, landlords had surveyed 75% of homes within the last five years, compared to 68% last year. But what about the quality of that data? A lot of what we do at Ridge is validating the information that housing providers already hold, to determine how accurate it is and what might be missing. We also find that systems are fragmented, so teams dealing with catch-up repairs, reactive maintenance, planned maintenance and development are using different databases or under different budget lines. Good data management joins the dots within an organisation and ensures important insights aren’t missed or ignored.

 

We need to look wider than just the property

Traditionally, stock condition surveys have been focused on the physical attributes of individual properties. But when we’re helping a registered provider prepare a business plan, we don’t just look at how old the kitchens and bathrooms are, and what state the wiring is in. We consider a whole range of information that encompasses the resident experience – void turnover rates, satisfaction surveys, indices of deprivation – to understand how well properties and related communities are really performing. This is the approach that the forthcoming revision to the Decent Homes Standard proposes to take, going beyond the four walls and roof to a wider understanding of how homes and communities operate.

 

Bring in specialist expertise to diagnose problems

Getting to the heart of a problem can require in-depth technical knowledge outside of the surveyor’s skillset. Issues with high-rise and non-traditional construction, cladding, and complex M&E installations such as district heating systems and lateral mains, for example, can all be expensive to fix and present considerable risks to a business plan if they are not properly factored in. As a multidisciplinary consultancy, we’ve found it invaluable to tap into wider expertise on everything from structural engineering and fire safety to large-panel systems and radon monitoring. Getting the right advice early on can be critical: on one project we discovered subsidence at the back of a property, and our Civil Engineering colleagues were able to trace the cause back to a council-owned water treatment plant that required acute work.

 

Better communication = better data

As stock condition coverage increases and retrofit programmes gear up, residents will be receiving multiple visits from specialist assessors without understand why or seeing any progress. It’s on all of us – consultants, contractors and registered providers – to coordinate our visits better, and to communicate to tenants why we’re doing them. At Ridge, we’re continuously evolving our team’s skills so that we can send multi-qualified assessors to capture as much information as possible including stock condition, energy and retrofit assessments.

Stock condition surveys are a vitally important activity for every registered provider, and it’s good to see the sector ramping up to reach the goal the Regulator has set. But it’s important to remember that condition data is not the goal in itself – it’s a tool that we have to use to achieve our ultimate purpose of ensuring tenants live in safe, warm homes and thriving communities.

 

Mark Astbury, Kevin Hartshorn, Matthew Stringer and Yusuf Siddiqui are Partners in the Property Consultancy team at Ridge.

The team will be attending the Housing Community Summit in Liverpool on 8-9 September – come and meet them on stand J32.

Mark will be chairing a panel discussion on “The role of asset management within regulation: the safety and quality standard”, on Monday 8 September at 12:00pm in Exhibition: Theatre 1.

You can also listen to Mark discuss the role of stock condition data in investment strategies in the Stonewater Housing vodcast, or contact him at mastbury@ridge.co.uk.

Contact Yusuf at yusufsiddiqui@ridge.co.uk, Matthew at matthewstringer@ridge.co.uk and Kevin at kevinhartshorn@ridge.co.uk.