Managing estates

Photo : Youth Cleaning Team We strive to achieve excellence in the management and delivery of the tenancy and estate management service, which aims to create a peaceful, safe and quality living environment.
Estate management incorporates empty property management, including the external appearance, abandoned vehicles, cleaning standards, communal areas, landscape and tree maintenance contract monitoring, vandalism, damage, graffiti, environmental improvements, security, rubbish disposal, and more.

How are we aspiring to improve the services you receive?

We are:

Carrying out regular estate inspections
Monitoring landscape works undertaken by our contractor ‘Glendale’.
Rolling out a proactive tree management system and programme of works
Setting service standards and seeking wider customer involvement with our Landscape Maintenance, Better Estates Group.
Sending Questionnaires to customers about different aspects of estate management, such as twice yearly “Armchair Monitoring” survey of our landscape maintenance standards to inform our drive toward continuous improvement and increasing communication for these services
Exploring innovative ways of enhancing or widening our services and using and developing the use of technology to support our work
Year on year developing best practice and evaluating value for money of these services.

Maintaining green areas

On 1st March 2007, Whitefriars Housing Group Ltd awarded a new 3-year Landscape Maintenance Contract to ‘Glendale’. This service covers routine grounds maintenance: grass cutting, hedges, shrub bed maintenance, litter picking and weed spraying of green areas. Glendale also carries out low-level tree maintenance, up to 2 meters from the ground. Our specialist tree contractors carry out general tree maintenance. Glendale is a subsidiary of Parkwood Holdings and is a leading provider of grounds maintenance services to the public and private sector delivering quality, value and innovation.

Glendale is a national company with a turnover of £37m and employs over 1,500 people. They have offices throughout the country including offices at Nuneaton and Warwick. Their local office in Coventry is located in Endemere Rd. Foleshill.

Glendale are working very closely with Whitefriars, and jointly we aim to make significant improvements to the appearance of estates through involving customers in service standards and prioritizing programmes of work. If you are interested in becoming more involved and wish to join our Better Estates Group, please contact our Customer Involvement Team on 024 7658 7083.

For more information log on to www.glendale-services.co.uk

Trees

During 2004, Whitefriars carried out a full tree survey employing Arbortrack who are a national and international arboricultural company based in Kenilworth. They identified the number of trees on our land and provided an inventory and full condition report of each tree with recommendations for planned tree maintenance over the next five years. This information is now loaded onto our Geographical Information System and the programme of works is underway.

Whitefriars employs two local tree specialists for the maintenance of its 10,000 trees.
Beechwood tree services carry out maintenance to the south of the city and Acorn tree services to the north.

Sheltered and Very Sheltered Accommodation

Whitefriars Landscape Rangers team carries out a grounds maintenance service to all of its 23 Sheltered and Very Sheltered Housing Schemes.

For more information contact the Landscape Office on 024 7655 5229 or contact us by email at landscape@whitefriarshousing.co.uk.

Whitefriars’ Response Team

Whitefriars’ Response Team (WRT) provides 24/7 security support and CCTV monitoring every day of the year. This innovative idea grew from a local initiative in the Hillfields area where a dedicated concierge service was developed to deal with extensive drug movement and other anti-social behaviour.

The idea was so successful that Whitefriars is extending the service on a city wide basis. There are various levels of support. Officers can make referrals and WRT will monitor situations to provide either support and reassurance to victims, and/or monitoring to catch the perpetrators. This work has enabled strong links to be established with the police, who value this service greatly.

Another feature of the service is that tenants of a block of flats can choose to pay a service charge to receive an even greater level of security, ranging from patrols and CCTV monitoring to an immediate response to distress calls.

WRT is increasingly making a difference to how safe and secure customers and colleagues feel.

For more information on these services, contact the Whitefriars’ Response Team on 024 7625 7463.

Our standards for empty properties

Whitefriars aims to provide homes of a decent quality and standard. We check all of our properties when they become vacant. If repairs are needed these will generally be completed before we re-let the property.

We have recently worked with customers to agree a standard for all properties that we re-let. This information is given to everyone who is offered one of our empty properties and leaflets are available upon request

We aim to re-let properties as quickly as possible and always accompany anyone who is made an offer, to have a look at the property.

We need your help

We want to encourage residents to report to us any properties that appear to be abandoned or where someone may have taken over the tenancy but has no right to be there. We can deal with this quickly, to stop vandalism and nuisance and make sure the property is allocated to someone who needs it.

Improving our service

We want to keep improving our services and welcome any feedback about our empty properties and our standards of re-letting. There are some areas of the City, such as Wood End and Hillfields, where we are working in partnership to regenerate our estates. Unfortunately this means that some properties stand empty for longer than Whitefriars and the community would like. We will keep talking to those communities to make sure they know what is happening.

For more information on any aspect of estate management, please contact any Whitefriars Office, or email us via our 'How to contact us' page.