Journal
New work
Repairing the repair process for social housing tenants
Homes NSW MyHousing Repairs service: rethink, redesign, and repair trust
In July 2024, the NSW Government launched its $1 billion Repair and Restore Maintenance blitz – the NSW Government’s largest ever investment. With 30,000 homes in urgent need of repair to make them safe and liveable, the aim was to make a real difference for public housing tenants by overhauling the maintenance system and ensuring tenant requests could be submitted and tracked more accurately and efficiently.
After 13 years of reliable service with minimal changes, the eRepair online service was still functioning well but had fallen behind tenant expectations in terms of good user experience. For Homes staff, the lack of integration with the repairs system led to additional manual work. As a result, significant call volumes to the MyHousing Contact Centre continued as tenants sought updates on the progress of repairs.
Partnering with the team at Homes NSW, Folk kicked-off a trauma-informed co-design process to design the first iteration of an improved product and experience. From the beginning, we built connections with tenants through in-person interviews and workshops. We heard about the impact of unresolved maintenance and repairs issues on their day-to-day lives, including health and safety risks, mental health, quality of life and financial strain.
We collaborated with tenants to prioritise the high-value features that improve transparency in the process, overall usability and communication with trades-people – some of the biggest pain points. These design features, amongst others, introduced critical enhancements for tenants including:
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Single sign-on with pre-populated information, meaning tenants can quickly and accurately submit requests, reducing stress and improving efficiency.
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Tracking repair requests in real time, with status updates, increasing confidence in the process and clarity on when their issues will be resolved.
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Uploading photos of the issue alongside descriptions, ensuring trades-people come prepared with fewer repeat visits and disruptions to the tenants.
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Viewing repair requests that had been made for the building by other tenants, avoiding the need for multiple tenants to make duplicate requests.
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Clearly seeing tenant responsibilities versus those of Homes NSW, reducing confusion and helping tenants address minor issues independently.
The new repairs service received over 1,000 requests in the first week after launch, a clear indication of the need for tenants. Designed to scale, the new service will need to accommodate requests from over 100,000 homes across NSW.
Work on phase 2 is already underway with continued input from tenants to design a second set of key features, further enhancing the experience of seeking repairs on a home.
We’re proud to have collaborated with Homes NSW and tenants to create an impactful solution and highlight the potential of carefully considered co-design to shift the experience and make real change in the housing system.
