Efficiency & Compliance, Customer Experience

Mastering Consumer Code Compliance, Best Practice, Building Safety & Customer Satisfaction with Guided Home: The All-in-One Solution for Home builders and Residential Developers

Written by

MattPope

Published on

September 23, 2024

Mastering Consumer Code Compliance with Guided Home

In an increasingly complex regulatory landscape, home builders, housing associations, and landlords must navigate a myriad of evolving consumer codes, best practices and regulations to ensure they deliver quality homes, stay legally compliant, and maintain high customer satisfaction. From homes for sale to shared ownership and build-to-rent, ensuring consistency in compliance is a major challenge. Enter Guided Home, a unique home handover compliance solution and customer journey app that empowers developers to streamline operations and meet consumer code standards for any tenure and building on one easy-to-use platform.

A Growing Web of Consumer Codes, Best Practice, and Regulations

The housing industry is governed by a number of consumer codes and best practices, each with its own set of converging requirements combined with some tenure-specific details for shared ownership and build-to-rent. For home builders, these include the New Homes Quality Code (NHQC), Consumer Code for Homebuilders, and Consumer Code for New Homes. The Shared Ownership Council is working with housing associations to finalise the Code of Good Practice for Shared Ownership and introduces a focus on the shared ownership journey, from exploration to staircasing. The growth of Build-to-Rent continues unabated, with multi-family going from strength to strength and Single Family starting to take some of the limelight.

The Association for Rental Living (ARL) for the build-to-rent sector has proposed a Code of Practice that also brings a focus on sustainability and community engagement. The Codes all share the same focus on fairness, transparency, accountability, service quality, and improving consumer outcomes across sales/rental, handover, and aftercare.

For landlords, the Social Housing Regulator’s standards for landlords cannot be ignored. The Consumer Standards Code of Practice sets out what’s expected of landlords and local authorities to deliver better consumer outcomes for tenants. The Regulator’s inspections and regulatory judgment and gradings are never far from the news headlines. It can be hard enough for SMEs to stay up to date and efficiently comply with all this complexity. For larger organisations, working across multiple tenures, regions, and divisions adds further layers of complexity. With each tenure seemingly having a different Code, the systems and processes to support the customer journey can become complicated and introduce compliance risk.

The Building Safety Act, of course, has additional requirements for high-risk buildings over 18 meters and includes additional fire safety checks, resident engagement, and information-sharing requirements.

Guided Home supports home builders, housing associations, and landlords of all sizes by offering a comprehensive solution that responds to these requirements in one streamlined platform.

Compliance Made Easy with Guided Home

Here’s a look at how Guided Home aligns with the major requirements and delivers efficient scalable processes, compliance, and better consumer outcomes:

Topic	Description	Guided Home	NHQC	Consumer Code for Home Builders	Consumer Code for New Homes	Shared Ownership Council	Regulator of Social Housing	ARL	Building Safety Act
Sales / Lettings Information	Clear and accurate sales information, costs, & legal documentation.	Connect, Evidence & Publish comprehensive sales/ renting, development & home information and documents direct to customers/ owner/ tenants	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
Vulnerable Customer Support	Tailored assistance for vulnerable customers during the buying/renting process.	Provides customer journey tracking, ensuring vulnerable customers receive extra attention.	✓	✓	✓		✓	✓
Costs & Charges	Clear information on management, services, maintenance fees, costs, or charges.	Transparent, accurate, easily updated fee guides and schedules (Affordability, management, service maintenance fee).	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
Pre-completion Inspections, Repairs & Defects	Allowing buyers to inspect the property before completion and report defects.	Integrated checklist for pre-completion inspections. Repair & defect capture by Developer, Owner/ Tenant or their Delegate; with real-time reporting.	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
Completion, Home Demo & Handover	Adherence to quality and completeness, home demonstration safety & handover.	Living, interactive Home User Guides & smart Home Handover Packs, Statutory Information. Real Time Sharing & Updates	✓	✓	✓		✓		✓
Warranties & Guarantees	Clear information on structural warranties and guarantees for the home.	Smart digital sharing of new home warranty, guarantees, policy & procedural information.	✓	✓	✓	✓
Aftercare	Post-purchase/rental support, including post-completion inspections, resolving defects and ongoing maintenance.	Comprehensive, accurate, easily updated Aftercare policy, procedures and Guides. Integrated an aftercare portal for inspections and defect capture, tracking and reporting.	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
Complaints & Disputes	Clear pathway for raising and resolving complaints, with formal dispute resolution available.	Always up to date complaints procedures, information sharing and digital record keeping of letters sent to customers.	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
Resident Engagement	Actively engaging residents in decision-making about services and community.	Real-time publication and updates to fire, safety, community and services information with residents					✓	✓	✓
Fire, Health & Safety Information	Clear health & safety, fire safety, evacuation procedures and fire door maintenance.	Easily publish and update fire safety measures, escape routes, materials specifications, maintenance requirements, evacuation procedures and reports to residents.	✓	✓	✓		✓	✓	✓
Structural Safety Information	Information on structural safety and materials used, especially in high-risk buildings.	Structural warranty information, procedures and contacts. Constructed product library. Key documents (EWS1 etc).	✓	✓	✓		✓		✓
Environmental & Sustainability	Addressing environmental impact, reducing carbon emissions, and promoting sustainability in building practices.	Share environmental impact data, material passports, ESG and guides to promote sustainability.	✓	✓	✓			✓

Why Guided Home is Essential for Residential Developers

1. Comprehensive Coverage Across All Tenures

Guided Home is versatile and accessible, supporting not only homes and apartments for sale but also shared ownership, affordable homes, and single/multi-family build-to-rent schemes on one easy-to-use, cost-effective solution. This makes it the perfect solution for developers managing mixed-tenure projects who must comply with a variety of consumer codes. Whether it’s ensuring compliance with the NHQC for private sale homes, adhering to the proposed Shared Ownership Council guidelines, or following ARL standards for rental properties, Guided Home has you covered.

2. Automated Compliance and Handover Processes

One of the most time-consuming aspects of managing residential projects is handling the paperwork. Guided Home automates this process by storing, organizing, and sharing key documents such as sales/lease agreements, welcome packs, home user guides, warranties, fire & safety information, commissioning certificates, and operational and maintenance manuals. This ensures that developers can quickly access records and demonstrate compliance with the Building Safety Act and other critical regulations without delays.

3. Maximising Customer Satisfaction

Guided Home not only helps you meet compliance standards but also improves customer satisfaction and makes life easier for your teams and partners. With tools to track and resolve defects and ensure transparent communication and updates, you’ll be well-positioned to receive high ratings in the NHBC Customer Satisfaction Survey and the HBF Star Rating System with no drop-off in service to the end of the defect liability period.

4. Efficiency at Scale

Whether you’re managing a handful of properties or delivering 10,000s homes across the country, Guided Home’s digital platform allows for consistent and efficient operations at scale. Developers can maintain compliance, ensure customer satisfaction, and minimise operational costs all with a single, intuitive system connecting your teams with your customers and partners.

5. Future-proofing Against Regulatory Changes

As consumer codes, best practices, and regulations continue to evolve, developers face new challenges in staying compliant. Guided Home’s platform is built to adapt, meaning that as new guidance, like those in the ARL standards for environmental sustainability, emerge, developers can quickly update their handover packs on Guided Home with minimal effort and remain compliant with the latest best practices.

Conclusion: Stay Ahead with Guided Home

In a competitive market, residential developers need a solution that not only ensures compliance but also improves operational efficiency and customer satisfaction. Guided Home is that solution. By offering a streamlined approach to managing compliance, digitising and simplifying business processes and building handover, and enhancing the customer journey, Guided Home positions developers, housing associations, and landlords to stay ahead of all consumer codes, guidance, and best practices.

For developers looking to scale efficiently and deliver better customer outcomes while staying compliant across all tenures, Guided Home is the platform of choice.

Book your free product demo today and see how Guided Home can make life better for your teams and customers.

www.GuidedHome.co