North West based specialist housing software company, Mobysoft, has signed with South East based affordable housing provider, Moat, following a highly successful eight week trial of its Rent Arrears Module.

Moat owns and manages over 20,000 homes and during the trial, £37,000 of rent in arrears was collected from residents. Mobysoft are market leaders with over 40 social housing clients across the UK.

For Moat, as with all housing associations, the pursuit and recovery of late, unpaid rent is a continuous and often costly battle. Residents can struggle to make rent payments for a wide variety of reasons, and when these are totaled across thousands of properties, the accumulated arrears can be significant and challenging to manage.

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Mobysoft's Rent Arrears Module bolts onto housing associations' existing housing management systems and intelligently sends a message to residents at the point that they fall into arrears whilst customer specific rules ensure that only those with genuine arrears are contacted.

Statistics prove that the key to recovery is early intervention.

Low level arrears are dealt with quickly, before they can escalate and become increasingly problematic, meaning that income officers time saved as a result of the automated process can be focused on the retrieval of high level, complex arrears.

Femi Odunaike, Head of Income Recovery and Financial Inclusion at Moat, said: "The collection of low-level arrears has been challenging for us in the past; it took up a large amount of our income officers time and when not dealt with in a timely fashion, could lead to higher level arrears which are more difficult to collect. By collecting rent on time, it frees up valuable resources within the business and allows us to focus our efforts on further improving services for residents."

(CD)