Right at Home Housing administered our 2018 Tenant Satisfaction Survey over the summer. The feedback our residents provide in this annual survey is a vital way for us to determine how we are best enhancing the lives of our residents with everyday operations. In addition, the Tenant Satisfaction Survey highlights where continuous improvements can be made as we expand and strengthen our services and property management.
Where do we succeed?
We are proud to say our tenants have shown a majority of high satisfaction with our staff who help them navigate various areas of their tenancy with Right at Home Housing, shown in Figure 1.
The results related to maintenance and caretaking are particularly encouraging. Based on feedback from the 2017 Tenant Satisfaction Survey last year, we had resolved to focus more energy into improving our in-house maintenance efforts. This resulted in adding new staff to the team and restructuring our processes as we develop more buildings to serve a larger number of residents. The positive impact of this change is evident in this year’s survey. As shown in Figure 2, there has been a 11% jump in positive reviews for our maintenance team and a whopping 19% increase in satisfaction with the turn around time to make repairs within our buildings, seen in Figure 3.
We are proud to see that we are continuing to meet our objective of providing a permanent home for our residents. Figure 4 demonstrates that over 60% of respondents have lived within our housing for over six years. Each of these responses has a success story behind it, with individuals successfully maintaining adequate and affordable housing for a long period of time. This is a dream that may have seemed impossible to many who were facing poverty at the time they walked through our doors.
Our hope is that this long-term stability provides residents with an opportunity to build community within and outside their buildings. While our results are encouraging, we see that there is further work Right At Home can do to support residents their journey to build meaningful connections.
What can our tenants look forward to?
One important aspect of the Tenant Satisfaction Survey was to assess whether our tenants feel socially isolated and how Right at Home can assist in their journey to build meaningful connections. We requested that respondents indicate their interest in social interactions with their neighbours and other groups From the responses seen in Figure 5, we see a generally positive level of social engagement among our tenants. However, Right at Home Housing is sensitive to our responsibility to welcome those of many backgrounds and recently employed a new staff member who is working on engagement with our Indigenous and newcomer populations and we look forward to creating more socializing opportunities within our properties as we approach 2019.
