Coventry City Council Enjoys 95% Success Rate With WhenFresh Unlicensed HMO Targeting Solution

2nd January 2024:  The licensing of HMOs (Homes of Multiple Occupancy) is a ‘hot topic’ for Councils up and down the country, where potentially significant revenues from undeclared and therefore unlicensed HMOs are lost and unscrupulous landlords are failing to comply with their statutory obligations.

To meet this challenge, WhenFresh has developed an innovative unlicensed HMO targeting solution to help Councils identify and prioritise investigations into potential unlicensed HMOs – to ultimately recover lost revenues, enforce landlord compliance and protect tenants.

One of the first local authorities to adopt the WhenFresh unlicensed HMO targeting solution is Coventry City Council and, by comparing their existing HMO licensing information against the candidate file supplied by WhenFresh, rental properties which appeared likely to be unlicensed HMOs were identified and prioritised for investigation.

Coventry City Council has already realised a 10x return on investment through fines and collection of additional licensing revenue, from completing investigations into only just a small proportion high priority cases delivered by the WhenFresh solution, with a success rate of 95% to date.

The WhenFresh unlicensed HMO targeting solution is also helping to expose portfolios of multiple unlicensed properties owned by individual landlords, from single investigations.

Paul Rout, SVP of Consultancy at WhenFresh states: “By using our own rich property data assets, supplemented by inputs from Equifax, Royal Mail, Zoopla and other data partners, we’ve been able to develop the means for Councils to focus their investigations on the HMOs within their areas which are most likely to be unlicensed. This enables their often-overstretched resources to recover lost licensing revenues and increase future licensing income very much more efficiently and cost-effectively than ever before. It’s a pleasure working with the Coventry City Council team and they’re already producing exceptional results. Long may that continue – and we look forward to helping plenty more local authorities to achieve similar outcomes.”

About the WhenFresh Unlicensed HMO Targeting Solution

The WhenFresh Unlicensed HMO Targeting Solution delivers the following information on residential properties within Coventry City Council’s area:

1 – Classification of residential property into owner-occupied, social rental and private rental properties;

2 – An aggregated HMO candidate ‘Risk Flag’, whereby rental properties are scored and prioritised by high to low likelihood to be HMO. This prioritisation is based on a range of factors including:

> Property attributes – property type, number of bedrooms, bathrooms, receptions etc…
> Property transactions – rental history.
> Third party data inputs – including Equifax, Royal Mail, letting process data etc…
> EPC Data – Energy Performance Certificates.

3 – As part of the solution, WhenFresh also delivers EPC data (where available) including current and potential EPC ratings to identify whether properties can be let.

In summary, the data-driven WhenFresh solution has already enabled Coventry City Council to recover significant lost revenues, drive up efficiency and success rates by focussing its resources on priority investigations into the most likely unlicensed HMOs.

To find out more about the WhenFresh unlicensed HMO targeting solution, please call Paul Rout on 020 7993 5818 or visit www.WhenFresh.com/HMO-Discovery