Income Manager (Home Ownership)

Contract Type: Permanent

Salary: £52,468 (£57,990 is achieved after 12 months successful performance in the role)

Working Hours: Full Time – 35 Hours

Working Pattern: Monday - Friday

Location: Leicester

The difference you will make as an Income Manager:

You will be responsible for income collection across our leasehold, shared ownership and market rented homes throughout the UK. Champion a strong ethos of partnership working to support strategic goals and support the Head of Income Management to embed a balanced culture of income protection and tenancy sustainment through prevention, early intervention and recovery strategies.

About you:

• Up to date knowledge of legislation, regulation and standards relation to social housing and income collection across all homeowner tenure types.
• In-depth understanding of tenancy and homeowners’ arrears recovery processes, tenancy support and sustainment.
• Proven track record to delivering continuous improvements to performance in a remote and agile way across a complex multi-site organisation.
• Strong understanding of service charges and rents and how to defend such disputes.

Role Profile:

• Maximise Riverside’s income through effective collection of homeowner rent, service charges and other income owed by residents and former residents by effectively managing the recovery process and litigation.
• Lead, motivate and engage the Income Homeowner team to deliver a high-quality total debt management service, developing and implementing operational objectives to underpin the Income Management Strategy through prevention, early intervention and effective arrears recovery strategies.
• Responsible for the management of all the leasehold, shared owners, freehold owners, and market rented property accounts. Ensuring early intervention on arrears and progressing through to eviction as required in line with policy and procedures.
• Supporting the Customers Charges team with service charge and rent queries, disputes and refunds. Ensuring relevant financial controls are in place and adhered to.
• Ensuring policies and processes are followed to deliver a continuous improvement in performance.
• Ensure the team provides an excellent, knowledgeable and professional customer service to all customers, colleagues and stakeholders, learning from complaints and focusing tenancy sustainment.
• Responsible for the development and effectiveness of the team through regular support, supervision, appraisals, and team meetings. Where appropriate address underperformance, disciplinary matters, sickness or capability.
• Proactively contribute to the development of income management policy and practice across the whole team and to the wider Directorate and Customer Services Priorities.
• Manage the performance of the team to deliver targets set for Homeowner arrears and any relevant corporate objectives, ensuring a high-quality service is delivered.
• Own and champion the Performance Management Framework for the service ensuring that collective goals and targets are cascaded to Team Leaders and individuals, ensuring frequent and consistent measurement of performance against agreed standards.
• Be a pro-active champion of the values and business transformation initiatives.
• Work with training and quality colleagues to ensure that all colleagues receive appropriate training in all aspects of their roles to effectively deliver the service, testing that learning objectives are achieved.
• Regularly review legislation, policies, trends, and benchmark practices to initiate and implement changes to maximise income collection. Develop innovative approaches to tenancy sustainment.
• Support and develop systems and data to optimise digital solutions to improve performance to sustaining tenancies and homeownership.
• Pro-actively build excellent relationships with customers, internal and external stakeholders to improve customer and colleague satisfaction ratings. Working collaboratively with other income teams, Housing and Tenancy Sustainment Services.
• Provide complex advice and guidance to colleagues including the Head of Income Management. This may include dealing with difficult or complex queries referred by the team, escalated enquiries and complaints as required.
• Review and be accountable for service information published to customers, determining the most appropriate method of communications.
• Ensure that all data protection requirements are met in accordance with the Group’s policy, procedures and statutory requirements.
• Ensure that health and safety requirements are met in accordance with the Group’s policy, procedures and statutory requirements.

Person specification:

Essential:

• Up to date knowledge of legislation, regulation and standards relation to social housing and income collection across all homeowner tenure types.
• In-depth understanding of tenancy and homeowners’ arrears recovery processes, tenancy support and sustainment.
• Proven track record to delivering continuous improvements to performance in a remote and agile way across a complex multi-site organisation.
• Strong understanding of service charges and rents and how to defend such disputes.
• Experience of managing income collection teams in a debt collection call centre environment to achieve high performance targets.
• Results driven with strong analytical skills and experience of providing meaningful management information.
• Commercially aware with a focus on continuous improvement and the ability to drive change.
• Attention to detail and outcome focused.
• Ability to work under pressure and deliver to deadlines, managing conflicting priorities.
• Customer focused with excellent written and verbal communications skills and able to present to a variety of audiences.
• Proven track record of effective stakeholders’ engagement both internally and externally.
• Excellent IT skills MS365 systems and income collection software.
• Customer focused and lives the Riverside Values.

Desirable:

• Demonstrable experience in Court action and advocacy.
• Experience of using housing management / income collection ICT systems.

Additional Information:

The Group has offices across the UK and on this basis, there will be the requirement to travel to other locations to effectively perform this role. The role holder must hold a valid UK driving license.

The role will be exposed to sensitive information; therefore the role holder is expected to maintain levels of confidentiality at all times and adhere to our data governance principles and procedures and schedule of delegated authority.

In order to fulfil the requirements of this role, you will be required to work flexibly during the hours of operation. This role is classified as hybrid.

The role holder is expected to be committed to equal opportunities and to promote non-discriminatory practices in all aspects of work undertaken.