Homeownership Officer

To provide a professional and comprehensive leasehold management service to our homeowners. To ensure that services are provided in line with legislation, regulation, best practice and in accordance with the terms of the lease. To promote customer satisfaction through ensuring our homeowners receive a quality, helpful, responsive and value for money service. You will manage your own patch of leasehold and shared ownership properties but will be required at the same time to effectively teamwork with your colleagues to provide a right first time, responsive and pro-active service to our homeowners.

**A day in the life**:
You will:

- Be responsible for dealing with day-to-day enquiries relating to leasehold and shared ownership management.
- Assist our Finance Team with the verification and checking of our annual service charges both estimated and Actual for our homeowners including sinking funds.
- Be responsible for dealing with alteration requests and any lease variation changes.
- Actively and proactively managing our Section 106 Schemes in respect of service standards, service charge budgets and end of year accounts to ensure accuracy, reasonableness of charge and Section 20B compliant.
- Be responsible for undertaking the Section 20 Consultation process.
- Work closely with our Incomes Team in respect of Arrears Recovery including preparation of any court /tribunal papers and attendance.
- Ensure all our systems and databases are accurate, kept up to date and regularly monitored.
- Ensure all correspondence is saved for future reference and safekeeping.
- Assist with any procedure or policy reviews for home ownership.
- Work jointly with our Neighbourhood Teams for our mixed tenure schemes and 100% home ownership schemes, to ensure a seamless and effective day to day housing management delivery.
- Work jointly with our Development and Sales Teams in respect of new sale schemes (Wandle’s and Section 106) including setting provisional service charges and involvement in handover and sale completion arrangements.
- Work closely with our repair and estate services teams in respect of communal cleaning, grounds maintenance and communal day to day repairs
- Work closely with our managing agents in respect of our homeowner Section 106 schemes.
- Attend evening meetings, estate inspections and site visits as and when required.
- Work pro-actively to promptly deal with and resolve service charge disputes and complaints.
- Prepare and present reports and witness statements for any court or First Tier Tribunal Hearing.
- Ensure all our new homeowners are “welcomed” to Wandle and are made aware of how they can contact us, their responsibilities under the lease and how their service charge are determined and calculated.
- Help set up focus groups and reader panels and to assist with the preparation of any homeowner publications and newsletters.
- Ensure all correspondence received is promptly actioned and responded. To chase up responses where the enquiry is being actioned by another team and to update the homeowner when there has been any delay.

**What you’ll need to have**:
- Degree-educated or equivalent
- Association of Residential Managing Agents/Chartered Institute of Housing
- Substantive experience of working in a front-line leasehold management services
- Thorough knowledge of legislation and best practice relating to leasehold management
- Experience of undertaking Section 20 consultation with leaseholders
- Experience of verifying and calculating service charges
- Experience of managing mixed tenure and Section 106schemes
- Self-motivated, performance driven with initiative to resolve complex disputes and complaints and to make decisions
- Experience of working to tight deadlines, under pressure and delivering high quality customer focused service with attention to detail and accuracy
- Excellent English language skills (written and oral)
- Excellent numeracy skills and be able to scrutinize complex accounts and budget information
- Proactively takes action to meet customers’ needs
- Has a can do attitude and commitment to improving service delivery
- Deals effectively with managing challenging and complex situations

**What next?**

If you want to be part of a winning team that takes pride in delivering excellent customer service to our customers and believe you have the skills and experience to be successful in this role, we would love to hear from you.

Interviews will be held in mid of June.

Please also note that ahead of the final stage interviews you will be asked to undertake a number of online tests/assessments.