Update from UrbanChoices.
Urban Choices Property achieved outstanding growth in our second year of operations, in excess of 30%. This is on track with the three-year Business Strategy and Growth Plan approved by the Urban Choices Board in 2016 and shows we are well on our way to becoming a leader in specialised property management services. Our growth was matched with an appropriate expansion of our team. We strengthened existing relationships and established new ones with organisations that share our vison and want their property investments managed by an experienced team that clearly understands complex tenancies. A major boost to achieving our growth targets was the appointment of Urban Choices by Home Equity Rental Service based in Queensland, to provide property management services for its portfolio of 89 NRAS properties around Melbourne. We’re also working with Mind Australia as their agent, providing tenancy management services to their clients in various locations around Melbourne. This year, Sacred Heart Mission chose Urban Choices to secure 24 head leasing properties in Melbourne as part of their Journey to Social Inclusion (J2SI) program to prevent homelessness. We’re delighted to be part of this innovative project that will run for the next five years and will make a major dierence in the lives of people who have experienced long-term homelessness.
This expertise is key to securing new opportunities for growth that may arise with the introduction of the NDIS and other government initiatives that impact housing supply. Visibility is important to our growth strategy and we undertook a branding and image review, and upgraded our website to become a useful source of information for both tenants and landlords, while marketing our unique expertise in property management and real estate. We made inspections easier for prospective tenants by introducing Inspect Real Estate, an online app that allows tenants to register with us to inspect a property. We can then notify them of any time changes, direct them to other suitable properties and advise how their application is progressing. We had a good year, one that presented challenges, delivered opportunities and enabled us to really demon- strate our unique capabilities in managing properties with commercial professionalism, and tenancies with com- passion and understanding. With the constant changes evolving under the NDIS and the unabating pressure on housing supply, we remain ideally placed for any investor or organisation looking for a positive-impact, commercially realistic property management solution for their property.
73 | Annual Report 2018
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