Good practices for managing Australia's public and community housing assets / Jim Davison (ed.)

This project investigates good practices for managing Australia's public and community housing assets. To a large extent the report concerns the identification of existing practices as an attempt to build a picture of asset management in public and community housing across Australia. But a report such as this cannot merely report current practice; in the attempt to search out good practices, or even best practice, external trends (local and international literature) and opinion (of those involved in managing public and community housing) necessarily must be pursued. The report addresses not just good practices but emerging trends and related opinions. Underlying this is the identification of an emerging contextual or structural problem---a dichotomy of views of the role and purpose of asset management within a social and community housing policy context, between the extremes of governance and service provision. The project's primary aims were to: (1) Identify and examine the current state and attributes of asset management practices applicable to social housing in Australia. (2) Discuss the key asset management issues and questions arising from international experience with social housing asset management. (3) Identify the set of characteristics associated with best practice applied to social housing asset management in Australia. (4) Review the literature and policy debates as they relate to the topics that emerge from each of the above objectives. The primary approach was organisational rather than individual. The objective was to assess the asset management practices of public and community housing asset managers through consideration of State Housing Authorities (SHA). Therefore, the dominant approach was to ask individuals about their organisations' practices. This project has a large scope and many different aspects and viewpoints. It describes the international and domestic treatment of social housing asset management, and along the way identifies that practices are very variable and implementation inconsistent. Social housing in Australia would benefit from a new approach to social housing asset management, with consistency in approach across all jurisdictions, and with a well-defined knowledge base not dominated by one particular perspective, but accommodating both