Lease Renewals and Partnerships Officer

About us at Hounslow

We’d love you to join us at the London Borough of Hounslow! Our people are deeply committed to providing excellent services to our residents, doing all we can to make lives as good as they can be.

Hounslow is the world in one place and full of potential. We are stepping up for our residents like never before.

About our Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion

We serve a diverse community, we have a diverse workforce and we are committed to being an inclusive employer.

We work hard to create representation across our workforce and leadership community, we have thriving employee network groups and our learning and development programmes help us lead, model and breathe ways of working that eliminate inequality, inequity, injustice and bias.

As part of this and under our commitments as a Disability Confident Employer, we make reasonable adjustments to accommodate our candidates. There’s space for you to tell us what you need within our application form.

About The Role

This is an exciting opportunity to join Homelessness, Independence and Preventative Services, Property Procurement Accommodation Service, which adopts a preventative approach across the housing, health and social care agendas. Your primary focus will be to work with private landlords and agents to acquire new properties that are suitable to prevent or resolve homelessness.

You must be able to learn and develop your knowledge required for this role and be able to travel independently around the Borough.

About The Team You’ll Be Working In

This is an exciting and busy role that is at the centre of the Councils response to homelessness. The service is developing and progressing our agenda to reduce the use of temporary accommodation and achieve more upstream prevention outcomes.

1. You will provide expert property advice and support service to existing and prospective private rented sector landlords within the PSL portfolio and lead on lease renewals and increase the supply of housing accommodation through acquiring properties in the private rented sector.
2. You provide a combination of customer facing contact with landlords, managing agents and residents in person,
3. You will support landlords resolve tenancy issues while also identifying tenants at risk of homelessness.
4. You will work collaboratively across the service and with other professionals to achieve individual outcomes for residents while supporting the shared goals of the council.
5. You will be the single point of contact for Children & Adult social care to help to help accommodation needs to social care cohorts and be responsible to lead on other joint partnerships to deliver financial efficiencies corporately for the Council.
6. You will assist in the negotiation with Senior PRS Acquisition Officers and options with owners and landlords for acquiring properties under the Council's Private Sector Leasing (PSL), Direct Lets (DL), Housing Association Leasing Schemes (HALS/HALD), Buy Back Scheme (BBS), HMOs and Bed and Breakfast (B&B).

1. You have experience of working in a customer orientated environment involving complex and diverse client groups and can understand and apply relevant legislation in your day-to-day work, including landlord and tenant law, homelessness and welfare benefits, while effectively managing customer expectations.
2. You are an excellent communicator to engage effectively with a broad range of people to influence, negotiate, persuade, building trusting relationships and devising value for money solutions to complex problems.
3. You act with integrity, take personal responsibility, work well under pressure and handle stress effectively while maintaining high levels of motivation and enthusiasm to secure new business opportunities using proactive and creative solutions.
4. You work independently, proactively and flexibly, while being highly organised to prioritise conflicting demands, making effective use of IT systems to record concise, factual, information and data.
5. You are a high performing individual who works collaboratively with others, adapting to meet a range of changing needs while achieving targets and service objectives and make the team the very best it can be.

If the points below resonate with you, we’d love you to put in an application:

• Are you passionate about customer services?
• Are you an experienced homelessness professional?
• Are you looking to working in a forward thinking and progressive housing department?

Qualifications:

• HHSRS Trained Desirable.

Essential for The Role:

• Basic DBS

Closing date: 10 March 2025.