Still looking for expertise

By Chris Seeley · 28 October 2019

Inside Housing recently published the findings of a survey, in association with Procurement Hub.

Entitled ‘Looking for Expertise’ the survey looked at the key drivers for seeking external help and the priorities in employing consultants to provide support. It would seem remiss of us as a housing consultancy not to comment on the article.

78% of respondents to the survey confirmed that they used development consultants and we are delighted to currently be engaged by 124 housing associations, local authorities and ALMO’s across England, Wales and Scotland.

As suggested in the article, the breadth of our engagement is widespread from site finding and negotiation through the development process to handover and managing defects. For some customers we provide a close to outsourced development and sales team, for others we might take specific roles for instance reviewing the delivery arrangements on a project procuring contracts and consultants or completing appraisals.

The survey confirmed that the top priorities for selecting a consultancy are expertise/experience, price, availability and capacity with reputation very close (4^th). In our experience we think that reputation plays far higher in client decision making and the feedback we receive indicates that reputation is paramount. We believe that the experience and expertise of a business and its team also count heavily, and this was judged to be the first priority in the survey. Certainly, our clients look to us to provide experienced experts to support their businesses.

The article says ‘developers want to hire people who know what they are doing and don’t want to pay an extortionate amount to do so,’ we would assert as this perfectly describes our consultancy proposition not only for development for all the services we provide.

We are pleased to be members of a number of framework agreements from which clients can call us off and you can always talk to us directly so no matter what your needs we are confident that our client side project management team can provide the support you need.