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

Wednesday, 25 February 2026

Shopping

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

After Solvares buys More-IQ, then merges with Totalmobile. UK housing DLO & contractor repair systems just got a lot more interesting. Two announcements in four days and neither is small.

Following on from consolidating FLS (Fast Lean Smart) recently, Solvares Group has acquired UK-based More-IQ, a true Cloud dynamic scheduling specialist that has been aiming straight at social housing landlords. Good on Nick, Katie and Gael on that one. 😉

Then Solvares and Totalmobile announced yet another merger, creating a combined group of 800+ people supporting 4,000+ customers, with housing explicitly called out as a key sector. This matters because scheduling these days is not a nice-to-have. In housing repairs, it is the control room. If the scheduler is average, everything downstream looks average too: customer comms, compliance visits, voids sequencing, multi-trade, right-first-time, and the “why did nobody turn up?” calls.

What does this mean in simple terms, a view from a seasoned sector Critical Friend ?

Solvares is stitching together optimisation and scheduling brains with a mainstream field service execution platform. More-IQ strengthens the cloud-native scheduling side, and Solvares explicitly positions it in their comms as boosting its offering for the housing sector and accelerating cloud-native innovation.

The Totalmobile merger statement is basically “planning through to execution”, at scale, with no immediate change promised to existing customers. Well, they all say that don’t they?

These platforms are winning some significant housing deals and often banging on about those wins. How some of those pan out to satisfactory go-lives might be somewhat shankier. I mean I see some of these in my projects.

Community Housing recently has selected Totalmobile’s platform to support repairs for 6,000+ homes, with 70 operatives, aiming for March 2026 go-live and projecting £750k+ net savings over five years. Hyde Housing has a published repairs contract with Totalmobile extending field-service and scheduling capability across wider operations. Wandle Housing Association awarded Totalmobile Connect, Mobilise and Analytics via G-Cloud. Raven Housing Trust and Vivid Homes are great More-IQ examples.

So what should DLO repairs managers and housing organisations do next? Maybe don’t panic. But also not sleepwalk into a new foreign-owned group making quiet changes while you are busy fighting damp, mould and backlog. After all, there are some great alternative indie choices out there too, such as ROCC who quietly seem to be just getting on with doing a good job with everything ‘in the SAAS box’.

Here is what I would get nailed down now, in writing, (with dates OBVs) :

Roadmap certainty: what gets invested in, what gets merged, and what gets nudged toward end-of-life over the next 24 months. The press line is “no immediate changes”, but “immediate” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there (like every merger or acquisition).

Commercial protection: what happens to pricing at renewal when products get “simplified” into bundles, or the additional contract clauses bubble up.

UK housing priority: ask how UK housing feature needs, support coverage, and escalation routes are protected when priorities get set outside the UK. Lets hope all decisions need not go via Heikendorf, DE in the future, that would not be clever for customers across the British Isles, RP's & AHB's.

Integration commitments: if your HMS, CRM, comms, compliance, BI Reporting, or contractor ecosystem hangs off scheduling, insist on a clear integration support plan. In a merger, interfaces are where surprises breed, particularly if some products could be depreciated, or swapped with other alternatives.

And what about OneAdvanced DRS, you know OptiTime as was? (Showing my age now)

This is the bit that should make OneAdvanced customers and prospects sit up straighter. OneAdvanced markets Dynamic Resource Scheduler as a core product for field workforce optimisation and it is also being sold on G-Cloud frameworks as Resource Scheduling (formerly DRS).

But the competitive pressure is more real than ever, because Solvares has just bought a supplier that is positioning itself as cloud-native dynamic scheduling software with a housing-first focus, and it is now (most likely) being paired with Totalmobile’s execution platform.

So the likely impact on DRS is not “DRS is dead” (not quite yet anyway). It is more like this: procurements get harder, buyers will ask more awkward questions about what “cloud” really means, and incumbents will be pushed to modernise faster because the Solvares-Totalmobile combo can pitch an end-to-end story with a cloud-native scheduling engine at its centre. Again, this is not an only option, look and think out of the box, you don’t always have to be with the big boys. Often small and perfectly formed is an advantage.

If you are a DRS landlord/user, you probably do not need to rip out and replace. But you should use this moment to extract roadmap clarity and commitments, because serious competition has just arrived with a variant of 100% true Cloud scheduling and (potentially) a much bigger chequebook behind it.

My Take is this could genuinely help providers, if it leads to better scheduling that matches the reality of housing, then actually executes cleanly in the field. However, consolidation is never a charity project. It is a control project. The winners will be the landlords who treat this like any other high-impact supplier change: tighten governance, pin down roadmap and commercials, and keep hold of their operational data and integrations so they stay in the driving seat. Hopefully the consolidated helpdesk will not give you too many sleepless nights.

Is your organisation struggling to justify a software change, or worried not everything has been covered?

Get in touch , I will drop in for a cuppa & bring the Fox's Chocolate Gingers ☕

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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.

Pet Shop Boys – Shopping

(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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Wednesday, 4 February 2026

I need to know

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

There is a particular kind of implementation day that starts with hope and ends with you staring into the middle distance, wondering how we got here. You have an “experienced supplier consultant” on the Teams call, billed at a £grand a day and up, and within ten minutes you realise the experience is mostly in filling out timesheets and saying “great question” while quietly avoiding the answer. They have often been parachuted in from the subs bench, often after being gently hoovered up from a customer who trained them as a super user, and now they arrive carrying one mental model of how SocialHousing works. One organisation, one configuration, one way of doing things, preserved forever like a fossil in amber. And because it worked at their old place, it must be universal. Like housing is a chain pub and every branch has the same menu, the same staff rota, and the same bloke in the corner who is always on his third pint of Guinness by 11:30.

What really sends my blood pressure north is the little phrase they wheel out when a client asks a perfectly sensible question about how the system behaves, how data flows, what the audit trail looks like, or what happens in the messy edge cases that happen every single day in real life. “Well you don’t really need to know about that.” Oh right. Cheers for that. I will just go back to running a regulated public service with vulnerable residents, governance, scrutiny, and a board that quite likes “knowing about that”, while you carry on pretending curiosity is a character flaw. It is a weird thing to say to people who have usually forgotten more about housing services than the consultant has ever learned. It is also a dead giveaway. It does not mean “you don’t need to know”. It means “I don’t know, and I’d like this conversation to stop before you notice.”

The bigger issue underneath it all is the sheer pride some suppliers seem to take in being siloed. You will meet someone implementing an integrated platform who proudly announces they “only do rent accounts” or “only do repairs, (just these non-DLO ones)” or “only do CRM scripts” as if they are a specialist surgeon. Except the whole selling point of an integrated system is that it is, you know, ‘integrated’. Housing does not arrive in neat little module-shaped parcels. A repair touches assets, compliance, contractor payments, tenant communications, satisfaction, sometimes safeguarding, and often a whole lot of reputational risk if it goes wrong. But somehow we are meant to accept that the person leading the work has no idea what happens when their bit of the system bumps into the next bit, like it is none of their business. For a thousand quid/euro a day, you would hope “none of my business” is not the core implementation methodology.

Then you get the repeated ritual of “I’ll take that away.” Now, to be fair, there is a proper version of that. Sometimes a question is complex, or it needs checking, or it depends on configuration choices. Fine. But there is another version where “I’ll take that away” is basically a substitute for knowing your own product. And when you have to “take it away” again and again, workshop after workshop, it stops being diligence and starts being theatre. The session loses momentum, decisions drift, the client loses confidence, and people start inventing workarounds because nobody can explain the real way the system behaves. The customer becomes the glue holding together a set of disconnected supplier specialists, and the customer is paying for the privilege. It is like hiring a plumber who can fit the taps but needs to “take away” any questions about pipes, water pressure, or whether your bathroom is actually connected to the rest of the house.

What makes it worse is the upside-down reward structure in supplier land. The person who survives implementations by deflecting questions and staying inside their tiny comfort zone can end up rewarded with a move into pre-sales or sales (Rolex incoming...), cheerfully presenting the whole suite like they designed it. Meanwhile the genuinely good consultants, the ones who learn the end-to-end flows, understand how housing actually works, and can join dots across modules without breaking into a sweat, are rarer than a quiet night out in the NQ4 Northern Quarter. Customers do not expect one human to know everything, but they do expect expertise proportionate to the day rate. If you are charging premium wonga and you are not even slightly embarrassed that you cannot answer basic questions about the system you are implementing, that is not just a knowledge gap. That is a culture problem.

And just to be clear, this is not about being nasty to individuals. People move jobs, people learn, and everyone starts somewhere. It is about the sheer normalisation of mediocrity, dressed up as “implementation experience”, and the way it wastes client time and project momentum. In social housing, you cannot wing it. We have complex tenures, care services, RSH regulatory pressure, scrutiny, tight budgets, and residents who pay the price when systems fail. A good implementer brings curiosity, humility, and enough badged product breadth to have an adult conversation about how things really work. They do not shut down questions, and they do not act like it is a badge of honour to only understand a tiny corner. If you are implementing an integrated system, you should be working to become integrated in your own knowledge too. Radical idea, I know but there you go, many do call me The SocialHousing ICT Critical Friend !

Is your organisation struggling with a long running, frustrating system implementation?

Get in touch , I will drop in for a brew & 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.

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, I Need To 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