Help and advice Why we sell some of our homes
As a not-for-profit housing association, we have limited resources, and we must make responsible and sustainable decisions about how we invest in our homes.
Part of our long-term investment plan includes a commitment to ensure all our homes meet a minimum environmental standard of EPC C. In some cases, it is clear the amount of long-term investment required to bring a property up to this standard would not represent a responsible or sustainable investment for us.
Where this is the case, we must make the difficult decision to sell these properties.
Here are some frequently asked questions about why we sell some of our homes and our long-term strategy to continue to provide high quality social and affordable homes across the West Midlands and South West England.
Frequently asked questions
We believe all our customers have the right to a safe, high-quality home.
The increased investment requirements for existing homes outlined above mean that for a proportion of our social housing stock, it is not financially viable for GSA to undertake the works needed to bring them up to the standards required by law and rightly expected by our customers.
Selling these homes privately generates income which will be reinvested to meet the increased costs of maintaining our remaining homes.
Although only a small proportion of our homes will be sold, properties holding one or more of the following characteristics will be held on a central register:
- Fails to meet current and/or future needs of our customers
- Will fail to meet regulatory standards and cannot be upgraded
- Not financially viable to retain and refurbish
- Has exceeded its design life expectancy
- No longer sits within GSA’s defined core operational area
- A sale would generate significant return and provide an opportunity to increase stock elsewhere
- Properties that may become uninsurable.
The majority of the homes we sell are purchased via auction to private buyers who are not required to make the EPC C and decarbonisation improvements that GSA would need to as a social landlord.
To ensure that GSA receives the right value for our homes, they are all valued by an RICS valuer before auction and the offer price must meet at least 90% of that value in order to be sold.
Most of the homes we sell will be vacant, but some will require consultation with customers to find suitable alternative accommodation nearby.
Before initiating conversations with customers, we undertake a tenancy audit to ensure we understand all the factors relevant to the household and are sensitive to these if we decide to progress the conversation. Customers who are selected to be considered for rehousing will receive a visit and a proposal will be shared with them for consultation.
Where customers are rehomed at our request, they receive a home loss payment and will have other reasonable costs including removals expenses reimbursed. GSA will also redecorate and carpet their new home.
We will never ask a customer to leave their home before they have found suitable alternative accommodation.
We are proud to be a social landlord and serve our customers and the communities they live in.
The provision of high-quality homes and services for our social housing customers is at the core of our vision, mission and strategy. Whilst we consider that the sale of a small number of our homes is part of a healthy and equitable asset management strategy, it is an activity we monitor carefully. All sales are notified to the Regulator for Social Housing and are governed by their standards.
We are continuing to build high-quality, new and energy efficient homes across the West Midlands and South West alongside selling some of our older homes which will be too costly to maintain in the longer term.
In the 2023/24 financial year we were recognised as one of the ‘biggest builders’ of social homes in England. In this time period we delivered 510 new homes, over 90 percent of which were made available for affordable rent, social rent or shared ownership.
Looking to the future, our 2023-28 business strategy, Simpler, Stronger, Better, rightly prioritises our existing homes for investment but we will still be building new homes across our localities in the years to come.
We recently completed a stock condition survey to give us data and intelligence about the condition of the 25,000 homes we manage across England. This intelligence has informed a long-term investment plan to make sure our customers can live in safe, warm, good-quality accommodation. This includes adding in £63m of additional costs to our forecast to bring properties up to EPC C by 2030, and over £0.5bn of new investment to meet 2050 targets for net zero carbon emissions. There is no long-term government funding support for these costs, which also do not generate any additional income for GSA.
