Housing Register & Support Officer

Portsmouth City Council's Housing Needs, Advice & Support Service works directly with customers to help deal with housing issues and prevent homelessness in the city. We are a busy front-line service dealing directly with customers, many of whom are vulnerable and disadvantaged. We give advice and assistance to our customers to resolve their housing need and make assessments of their housing and support needs in accordance with the Housing Act 1996, and Portsmouth City Council's Allocations Scheme. We are committed to excellent customer service, to listening to and understanding our customers' circumstances, and working collaboratively with them to identify housing solutions.
We are committed to safeguarding and promoting good practice and all employees are required to adhere to internal safeguarding policies.
Based in Housing Needs, Advice & Support, you will be part of a team that assesses customer applications to join the Portsmouth Housing Register and allocates social housing vacancies to customers in need on the housing register.
In this role, you will help manage customer demand, prioritising work to ensure enquiries are dealt with in the appropriate timescales.
You will handle initial enquiries from customers wanting to join the housing register, analysing these enquiries to understand the main presenting demand and determine whether the customer has provided enough information to support an application. This will often require you to review existing notes and documents held by the department and make further enquiries with the customer.
You will also handle enquiries from customers who want information regarding an existing application or to question the outcome of a recent assessment. You will be required to determine whether the enquiry should be reassessed or if it meets the threshold for a formal review.
You will manage requests from the Council's social housing partners asking us to nominate new tenants to their vacant properties. You will review these requests to ensure the landlord has provided all the information needed to successfully allocate the property. Where information is missing or inaccurate you will liaise with the landlord to gather the correct details.
You will record new customer enquiries and new allocation requests onto our IT systems and assigning these tasks fairly and appropriately to the Housing Register & Allocation Officers.
Using our IT systems, you will record appropriate system notes, ensuring a clear and auditable trail of your actions and decisions, and extract data to provide measures to help us understand and inform the work.
You will provide administrative support to your manager & colleagues, for example printing & sending letters, helping to arrange customer appointments, or recording the minutes at meetings.
You will need excellent communication skills, patience and empathy as well as resilience and an ability to think on your feet and manage multiple priorities. This is an excellent opportunity if you are looking for a career in housing as you will gain a wide range of experience and knowledge and an opportunity to enhance your skills working with customers.


Skills:

• Has an interest and experience of the issues facing vulnerable households with housing needs, and a desire to assist customers to resolve these issues.
• Is able process and gather information to understand what is needed or wanted by a customer.
• Is confident and can clearly and effectively communicate both verbally and in writing, giving advice and explaining housing policy to our customers.
• The ability to converse at ease with customers and provide advice in accurate spoken English is essential for the post.
• Is able to show empathy and understanding to customers and deal tactfully and sensitively with their enquiry.
• Has excellent organisational skills, and an ability to prioritise work and organise the daily demand from customers to the service.
• Is flexible and able to respond to changing priorities and levels of customer demand.
• Is emotionally resilient and able to deal with the impact of being exposed to customer's difficult circumstances, and remain professionally detached and focused even if the message you deliver involves saying no.
• Has an awareness of equalities issues and is committed to equal opportunities.
• Understands safeguarding and can recognise safeguarding concerns and take appropriate action to manage risk.
• Works proactively and can remain motivated, working on their own initiative.
• Has a good level of IT skills and is proficient in Microsoft Office Suite.