Housing 2018: Moving the housing sector forward
Published 2nd July 2018
“Let’s be open with our information,” Fortem’s director of business solutions, Geoff Parkinson, told the audience at our ‘Supporting contractors to be successful’ session at Housing 2018 in Manchester on Wednesday morning.
“We have to help the sector move forward,” he said.
At Fortem, we practice what we preach. We are dedicated to helping our housing provider clients, suppliers, and peer organisations to provide better services and to residents – which is why we’ve been so supportive of the Chartered Institute of Housing’s annual national event.
Not only did we sponsor the main café in Manchester Central this year, where professionals from across the country can sit down together and share ideas, our branding appeared across the front of the building, including next to the clock we all use to make it to meetings and sessions in time.
On Tuesday, we hosted a comedy evening at the Midland Hotel, with comedian Shappi Khorsandi as our special guest. During the event, we held a charity auction, which raised £3,700 for four boxing gyms in our local communities, which provide young people with focus, drive and encouragement.
Throughout Housing 2018, we’ve been talking to delegates about our new Refer IT mobile app, which allows our workforce to make the most of every visit to properties – capturing key information that supports housing provider clients to look after the interests of their asset and their customers.
The app allows an operative to take a photo of an issue and Artificial Intelligence assists the user to categorise what the issue is before sending the information to our SMART Hub.
We’ve also been discussing our 4Life Academy – our £1 million training facility in Birmingham, through which we improve the skills of our own team, as well as residents, partners and members of our supply chain.
Later this year, we’re opening another 4Life Academy in Dinnington, near Rotherham, meaning we’ll be able to more easily provide training to our clients, partners, suppliers and community members in the north of England.
It’s been a busy week for the Fortem team, but we’ve all come away from Manchester feeling that we’ve contributed to conversations that will help the housing sector to make progress.
These same conversations will no doubt result in our team members coming up with yet more innovative ideas in the near future.
We look forward to sharing them at next year’s event.