Tony Smith,that Housing IT Guy https://uk.linkedin.com/in/tonysmiththathousingitguy @HousingITguy

Some thoughts on IT and UK SocialHousing from a unique perspective of over 27+ years working with over 140 RSL's, Councils and social landlord groups in the UK, Ireland & Australia. (c) No reproduction without prior/express permission Available for independent housing RSL implementation, procurement of HMS, Repairs, CRM, EDM, DLO, Financial, Scheduling systems, critical friend etc. In Scotland I work with the folks at Arneil Johnston Check us out on Soundcloud /housingitguy

Friday, 2 October 2026

Bought and Sold

If you do the X / Bluesky thing, follow me at @HousingITguy or LinkedIn here https://uk.linkedin.com/in/tonysmiththathousingitguy

Rubixx, those new owners, big ambitions....

There aren't too many occasions in the UK social housing IT market when an innovative, relatively young supplier genuinely shakes things up, wins customers and, perhaps more importantly, keeps them happy.

Rubixx in its original form appears to have managed exactly that. I've encountered plenty of satisfied Rubixx customers over recent years, something that isn't always easy to find in the housing management systems market. I've also recently been involved with Hanover Scotland on a particularly successful Rubixx procurement and implementation, as Critical Friend, where I've seen first-hand what can be achieved when a committed social housing provider and a responsive software supplier work properly together. It's refreshing when implementation meetings are mostly about making progress rather than compiling another list of reasons why something can't be delivered!

Also, a supplier keen on multiple occasions to tell us, "We are not for sale".

So the late September 2026 announcement that Rubixx, alongside Voicescape, has been acquired by the newly formed Elevare Software Group, backed (inevitably) by private equity investor Livingbridge, is certainly interesting. Elevare is led by experienced ex-Capita software industry executives David Lockie and Elona Mortimer-Zhika, bringing considerable experience of growing technology businesses. The group has made much of its intentions to invest, innovate and help these businesses grow while retaining their identities. All sounds rather promising, doesn't it? And with Voicescape's established strengths in resident engagement, automation and predictive income collection alongside Rubixx's cloud-based housing management and finance capabilities, there are some potentially attractive opportunities for social landlords.

What interests me most, however, isn't the ownership structure, investment headlines or the inevitable talk of AI transforming absolutely everything before we've even finished our last brew. It's what happens to Rubixx's existing and generally extremely royal customers. From my experience, one of the company's strongest selling points has been the accessibility of its people, responsiveness to customer requirements and willingness to get things sorted.

Smaller suppliers can sometimes achieve something their larger competitors struggle with: customers actually feel that somebody is listening. I've seen enough housing IT implementations over nearly three decades to recognise that this is worth considerably more than another glossy product roadmap. Rubixx's new owners would be wise to recognise that they've acquired more than software and recurring revenue. They've acquired a reputation and some hard-earned customer goodwill. Substantial releases every eight weeks another key attraction.

Of course, additional investment could be excellent news. More experienced developers, implementation consultants, customer support specialists, more AI capabilities and product experts could help Rubixx further accelerate development, strengthen delivery capacity and compete for larger housing association contracts. The opportunity to recruit talented people, potentially including some with experience of larger housing software businesses such as Capita, could bring valuable knowledge and discipline. But here's the rub: more people don't automatically mean better service. I've witnessed suppliers grow their headcount, introduce several exciting new management layers and somehow make it harder for customers to speak to anyone who actually knows the answer. That's quite an achievement, although probably not one to put in the annual report!

There are also some interesting questions about where Elevare takes its new housing technology portfolio. Will Rubixx and Voicescape remain distinct, complementary solutions, or will customers eventually see deeper integration across housing management, customer engagement, income recovery and automation? Could the investment make Rubixx a more credible contender for medium-sized and larger landlords that might previously have considered it too small? Certainly a sector segment where Rubixx has historically not been seen, And critically, will growth be supported by the same straightforward customer relationships and implementation approach that have helped establish its reputation? Existing customers will understandably want continuity, stability and an improving product. Prospective customers will want evidence that the additional financial backing translates into greater capability rather than simply bigger sales targets and more communication layers.

Personally, I welcome the investment and hope it proves a tremendous success.

The ever shrinking UK social housing IT market needs credible competition, fresh thinking and suppliers prepared to challenge some of the established names. Rubixx has demonstrated that there's room for a different approach, and my own experiences, particularly at Hanover Scotland, give me good reason to be optimistic.

The real test now for Elevare won't be how quickly it expands or how many impressive industry executives it recruits. It'll be whether those existing Rubixx customers are still singing its praises in two or three years. If the new owners can combine greater financial strength and technical capacity with the personal service that helped Rubixx succeed, they'll have achieved something rather special. Just don't turn a good, responsive software company into another corporate sausage machine, where customers need a reference number, three escalations and a committee meeting to get something fixed!

Struggling on non-Cloud and legacy solutions ?

Give me a call, I will drop in for a cuppa & bring your favourite biscuits ☕

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I would be pleased to connect with you on LinkedIn - http://uk.linkedin.com/in/tonysmiththathousingitguy Message me with any issues or queries, you would like to be explored in this blog. We generally receive a couple of suggestions each month.

Rory Gallagher - Bought & Sold

(c) Tony Smith, Acutance Consulting www.acutanceconsulting.co.uk 07854-655009

Access a quick list of our Social Housing ICT blog posts here , what projects do we get involved in? Access them here

Could we help you or your organisation? Our contact details are here , get in touch we will be pleased to chat about your problems and help with your organisation issues.

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Friday, 4 September 2026

Cheap Sunglases

If you do the X / Bluesky thing, follow me at @HousingITguy or LinkedIn here https://uk.linkedin.com/in/tonysmiththathousingitguy

Following comments received from a blog a few weeks back, thoughts on housing IT solution procurement: Why Should the Cheapest Tender Get the Most Marks?

There are better ways to evaluate price. And yes, they're legal.

One of the strangest habits in public sector IT procurement is our continuing love affair with awarding maximum price marks to whoever submits the cheapest tender.

Supplier A offers a Housing Management System for £900,000, Supplier B wants £1 million, and Supplier C quotes £1.1 million. Under the familiar MEAT 'lowest price divided by tender price' formula, Supplier A gets full marks, while the others are immediately penalised. Never mind that Supplier A might have underestimated data migration, left half the integrations out or assumed that training consists of sending everyone a PDF and wishing them luck.

This stuff happens more often than you would reasonibly imagine.

Apparently, being cheap is a virtue all by itself. Of course, we talk endlessly about value for money, but our scoring models sometimes suggest that we've confused value with a bargain-bin sticker. While this is software, in real life we fully understand the adage that if we buy cheap there is risk baked in, we might need to buy twice. I mean this is not £800 for a solar pergola for your patio, this might be a multi-million pound contract for 7+ years.

Here's something that might surprise a few procurement teams: UK public procurement legislation doesn't generally require us to award the highest price score to the cheapest compliant tender. In Scotland, Regulation 67 of the Public Contracts (Scotland) Regulations 2015 requires the best price-quality ratio, permits lifecycle costing and even expressly allows a fixed price with competition based on quality. For procurements governed by the Procurement Act 2023, principally in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, the emphasis is on the Most Advantageous Economic Tender, with flexibility over appropriate award criteria and assessment methodologies. Different legislation, broadly similar message: cheapest doesn't automatically mean best. Naturally, the procurement methodology must be objective, transparent, proportionate and published in advance. Making up a clever new formula after opening the envelopes isn't quite the innovation we're looking for.

There are several sensible alternatives. Whole-life costing evaluates implementation, licences, hosting, support, integrations, migration, upgrades and eventual exit costs over, say, seven or ten years, rather than rewarding an artificially attractive starting figure. Fixed-price, quality-led competition can establish an affordable budget and ask suppliers to demonstrate the strongest deliverable solution within it, subject to the applicable rules.

Awarding the bidder closest to the average of all costs tendered can be a great option. This rewards more realistic bidders and penalises ones way above or under-cutting the average.

Price-band or capped scoring can reduce the advantage gained from shaving a small amount off an already competitive price, allowing properly evidenced quality differences to matter more. Another approach uses a carefully designed graduated pricing model to reduce the incentive for aggressive underbidding. Scotland has already published official guidance on a Graduated Pricing Mechanism, admittedly for construction procurement, demonstrating that government itself recognises the problems created by conventional price scoring. These approaches aren't interchangeable legal templates, but they provide useful alternatives worth examining.

Whatever model we choose, housing IT buyers should also challenge the numbers behind the quotation. Does the price include every required interface? How many data migration iterations are provided and are they all costed? What happens when the supplier's implementation-day allowance runs out? Are support, additional users, annual increases, testing environments and exit assistance included? A cheap initial tender can become remarkably expensive once the change requests start breeding. I'd rather evaluate a realistic £1 million proposal than congratulate myself on buying a £750,000 fantasy that eventually costs £1.4 million needing multiple additional trips to SMT meetings. Price certainty, clearly documented assumptions and contractual protection are worth considerably more than a few attractive decimal places on an evaluation spreadsheet.

There's a governance responsibility here too. Buyers should involve finance, procurement, ICT and operational SMEs in designing the commercial assessment before the ITT goes anywhere near the market. Test proposed scoring methodologies using hypothetical bids, check for perverse incentives and understand how different prices would actually affect the overall result. Set clear minimum quality requirements, assess affordability properly and investigate potentially abnormally low bids through the appropriate legal procedure. The objective isn't to engineer the scoring so our favourite supplier wins. It's to stop the scoring accidentally rewarding the supplier most willing to gamble on an unrealistic price. That's rather an important distinction, particularly when spending tenants' rents or public money.

Ultimately, suppliers are commercial organisations. If we create an evaluation model that rewards rock-bottom prices, we shouldn't look astonished when they respond with rock-bottom bids and a creative interpretation of what's included. They're simply playing the game we've designed. Perhaps it's time housing providers stopped treating the cheapest tender as the cleverest purchase. Procurement regulations offer considerably more flexibility than some traditional scoring spreadsheets would have us believe. We just need the confidence, commercial understanding and proper procurement advice to use it. Because nobody ever thanked a housing IT project team for saving £100,000 on the tender price before spending another £400,000 putting the resulting mess right.

In fact so many clients have told me that our engagement costs have been a small fraction of estimated savings made, its clear that bringing external experience can provide significant benefits.

Trying to replace a system on a tight budget ?

Give me a call, I will drop in for a coffee & bring the Macaroons ☕

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I would be pleased to connect with you on LinkedIn - http://uk.linkedin.com/in/tonysmiththathousingitguy Message me with any issues or queries, you would like to be explored in this blog. We generally receive a couple of suggestions each month.

ZZ Top - Cheap Sunglasses

(c) Tony Smith, Acutance Consulting www.acutanceconsulting.co.uk 07854-655009

Access a quick list of our Social Housing ICT blog posts here , what projects do we get involved in? Access them here

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Wednesday, 19 August 2026

Hell Yes !

If you do the X / Bluesky thing, follow me at @HousingITguy or LinkedIn here https://uk.linkedin.com/in/tonysmiththathousingitguy

Most procurements should be expected to be a game of points, prices and creative answers. Truth is, that's just the way it is.

Having spent plenty of years around social housing IT procurement, I've developed a healthy scepticism about supplier tender responses. Not because suppliers are necessarily dishonest, but because they're rather jolly good at answering the question they wish you'd asked, rather than the one actually sitting in the ITT. Ask a straightforward question about whether their system supports a particular business requirement and you'll sometimes receive three paragraphs of impressive-sounding waffle and weasel-words that manages to avoid saying yes or no. If you need a grave diggers shovel to dig out the actual answer, there's probably something worth investigating.

Closed questions are particularly entertaining. Ask whether a specific feature is supported and, where the honest answer might be 'partially', you're sometimes treated to a lovingly recycled chunk of marketing material, presumably copied from another tender, another customer or possibly another decade. Then there's that old favourite: 'Further analysis required.' Which can mean anything from 'we need to understand your requirements better' to 'we haven't got a clue whether our software does this'. To be fair, some requirements genuinely do need clarification. But when the question is perfectly clear, 'more analysis required' isn't an answer. It's a polite way of kicking the problem down the road, ideally until after the contract has been signed and additional change control costs may be incurred.

We also need to recognise that, for suppliers, a tender is something of a puzzle to be solved or exam to pass. Their bid teams study the evaluation criteria, scoring weightings and response limits, then work out how to collect the maximum available marks. That's what they're paid to do. If the scoring rewards particular phrases, expect those phrases to appear with remarkable frequency. If a requirement is worth five points, somebody will be figuring out how to turn a rather questionable three into a convincing five. Meanwhile, buyers may be congratulating themselves on a rigorous evaluation process that's actually rewarding the supplier with the most polished bid-writing team rather than the most suitable software.

Indeed these days use of AI by bidders will faithfully echo back your requirements to you. Often clarification question answers are recycled by AI to give the answers. Its a pity AI will not be implementing the successful solution, as in some cases that might substantially speed the process up, or bring superior knowledge to the build.

Price scoring introduces another opportunity for a bit of creative thinking. Where the lowest tendered price attracts maximum marks, there's an obvious incentive to make that headline figure as attractive as possible. Of course different costing methodologies are available. Essential functionality can become an optional extra, implementation assumptions can be remarkably optimistic, and future configuration, integrations, data migration or additional consultancy may turn up elsewhere in the commercial arrangements. Not every supplier does this, of course, but the cheapest tender isn't necessarily the actual cheapest solution. A bargain HMS or CRM implementation that subsequently requires a small fortune in change requests isn't much of a bargain. Funny how those extras rarely feature prominently in the original sales presentation. A painfull experience in practice and leaves a bad taste in the mouth for the contracting body.

This is where buyers need to sharpen their pencils, have help from outside for their questioning. Don't just award marks because somebody has written a confident answer. Distinguish between functionality that exists today, functionality requiring configuration, functionality needing bespoke development and functionality that's currently little more than a twinkle in the product manager's eye. Challenge conditional answers, demand evidence, references, test claims through structured supplier demonstrations and examine the full cost of ownership. Above all, make sure your evaluation methodology rewards genuine capability and a deliverable solution, rather than beautifully constructed promises. Procurement rules and fairness still matter, so challenges and clarifications need to be consistent, properly recorded and within the published process.

And here's the important bit. Suppliers aren't inherently evil. They're trying to win a sale. They've got sales targets, shareholders, staff to pay and competitors breathing down their necks. Of course they're going to present their products and prices in the most favourable possible light. We'd be rather surprised if they didn't. But it's not their job to protect a housing provider from making a poor purchasing decision. That's our responsibility as buyers and educated/experienced consultants. We need to understand what's genuinely being offered, what's assumed, what's missing and what it'll really cost to deliver. Because the objective isn't to buy the tender response with the highest score. It's to buy the right system for you, from the right supplier, at a realistic price, that will actually work for our organisation.

Winning the procurement game is one thing. Living with the result for the next ten years is quite another.

Struggling building a tight invitation to tender or collaborating with your procurement team ?

Give me a call, I will drop in for a coffee, chat & bring the Hobnobs ☕

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I would be pleased to connect with you on LinkedIn - http://uk.linkedin.com/in/tonysmiththathousingitguy Message me with any issues or queries, you would like to be explored in this blog. We generally receive a couple of suggestions each month.

Beck - Hell Yes!

(c) Tony Smith, Acutance Consulting www.acutanceconsulting.co.uk 07854-655009

Access a quick list of our Social Housing ICT blog posts here , what projects do we get involved in? Access them here

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Friday, 17 July 2026

What Would I Know ?

If you do the X / Bluesky thing, follow me at @HousingITguy or LinkedIn here https://uk.linkedin.com/in/tonysmiththathousingitguy

Often overlooked, one of the most important decisions in any social housing IT procurement isn't which supplier to invite, which system to shortlist or even how much money to spend.

It's getting the right social housing Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) involved from the outset.

These are the staff folks who understand how income collection, repairs, lettings, tenancy management, asset management, compliance, letting commercial units using Quarter Days and customer services actually operate. Not necessarily how the procedures manual says they operate, but how things really get done on a wet Tuesday morning when three things have gone wrong before ten o'clock. Curiously, they're often the very people nobody thinks to involve until something starts going pear-shaped. So they are pretty valuable IMHO !

Soft-market engagement is where their knowledge starts earning its keep. Suppliers can deliver a cracking presentation about their latest functionality, impressive dashboards and wonderful automation capabilities. Marvellous. But an experienced housing officer or repairs manager can ask the awkward question that cuts straight through the marketing: "That's lovely, but what happens when we have a property we keep selling and buying back...?" Suddenly we're discussing real business complexity rather than a beautifully choreographed demonstration. The right SMEs help distinguish between genuinely useful functionality and something that looks splendid on a Copilot built PowerPoint slide deck, but offers precious little operational value.

When building the specification, SMEs become even more valuable. A decent requirements document needs to describe actual business needs, exceptions, controls, integrations and outcomes, not simply reproduce everything the existing system does, including the rubbish bits. Replacing an ageing system shouldn't mean lovingly recreating twenty years of 'we have always done it this way' workarounds in expensive new software. Good SMEs know which processes are essential, which need improving and which should have been taken out behind the shed years ago. Get the wrong people involved and you'll end up with a specification full of vague aspirations, missing requirements and the immortal phrase 'the system must be user-friendly'. Well, hopefully that's cleared that up then.

The assessment of ITT responses is another area where SME operational experience matters enormously. Suppliers are generally quite good at saying 'Yes', particularly when there's a sizeable contract at stake. A tick in a compliance matrix, however, doesn't necessarily mean the functionality exists, works as expected or comes included in the quoted price. Experienced SMEs can challenge those answers, distinguish standard functionality from configuration or bespoke development, and spot where a supplier has cleverly answered a slightly different question. A technically compliant response isn't necessarily an operationally workable solution. That distinction can be worth a fortune over the life of a contract.

Then come the supplier demonstrations, where the right SMEs really earn their biscuits. Leave suppliers to demonstrate whatever they fancy and you'll be treated to an immaculate sequence of dashboards, mobile screens and smiling fictional tenants. Instead, give them realistic scenarios based on your organisation's processes, data and awkward exceptions, with consistent scoring criteria. Put knowledgeable frontline staff in the room and let them follow a transaction from beginning to end. Can the system actually handle the complicated tenancy change, the messy arrears case or the repair that doesn't follow the happy path? A decent demonstration should test the software, not the supplier's ability to operate PowerPoint with confidence.

Of course, there's one rather inconvenient problem. The best SMEs are usually the busiest people in the organisation. They're valuable precisely because everyone relies on them, so freeing up their time can feel like asking for the Crown Jewels. But treating their involvement as something to squeeze in between their normal duties is a spectacular false economy. Give them proper time, clear responsibilities, effective facilitation and a genuine say in the decisions. Include people who understand the detail, not just managers who understand the organisation chart. Get your SMEs right and you've a fighting chance of buying something that works. Get them wrong, or don't involve them at all, and you'll probably discover their importance about eighteen months later, when the shiny new system goes live and somebody asks why it can't do something the old one managed perfectly well.

Still, at least the procurement finished on time....

Unsure about getting the most from your current housing, assets & repairs solutions?

Give me a call, I will drop in for a brew & bring the Fox's extra chocolatey ☕

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I would be pleased to connect with you on LinkedIn - http://uk.linkedin.com/in/tonysmiththathousingitguy Message me with any issues or queries, you would like to be explored in this blog. We generally receive a couple of suggestions each month.

The Datsuns - What would I know

(c) Tony Smith, Acutance Consulting www.acutanceconsulting.co.uk 07854-655009

Access a quick list of our Social Housing ICT blog posts here , what projects do we get involved in? Access them here

. . . . . . . . . . . . ES | FR | DE | IT | UK