Income Officer

We are One Housing and we create places for people to call home and support them to live well. With a breadth of services and expertise to help people whatever their housing, care, or support needs. We are part of Riverside, a group of complementary businesses with a charitable housing association at its core. We believe in creating places that people can call home, supporting people to live well and building lasting homes and communities.

The One Housing Customer Services teams are friendly, knowledgeable and we love what we do.

We are proud of our expertise and passionate about the high-quality, service we deliver to all of our customers.

We offer our colleagues a friendly, collaborative workplace and the chance to build a rewarding career with a not-for-profit organisation that is proud to make a genuine difference to people’s lives, each and every day.

Join our Customer Services team as an Income Officer – Homeowners

Our Customer Services teams play a central role in achieving our vision. Our teams include our Customer Contact Centre and specialist teams like income collection, rent and service charges and resident management. Often acting as a first-point of contact for our customers we prize our accountability, empathy and a genuine self-desire to be helpful and informative.

We’re an organisation with strong values. We Care, We are Inclusive and We are Trusted. This is what makes us such a great team, working together as one to achieve our vision of Transforming Lives, Revitalising Neighbourhoods.

Citystyle is the commercial arm of One Housing managing all non-social property for One Housing including leasehold, shared ownership, private rented and commercial tenures. It also is responsible for a number of organisation wide functions including billing rents and service charges; managing third party arrangements and home purchase schemes. Citystyle also provides in-house legal services across One Housing and manages income collection across all tenures.

The role

We have a fantastic opportunity for someone to join us in the position of Income Officer.

Salary: £28000 – 32000

Location: Hybrid, 3 days working from home and 2 days in the office in Camden, London

Hours: 35 hours per week

Contract: 12 month Fixed Term Contract to cover maternity

Your responsibilities will include:

• Ensure the efficient and effective collection of service charges for shared ownership and leasehold properties and of shared ownership rents.
• Responsible for the collection of housing related debt (current and former)
• Deal with enquiries and ensure the assignment procedures are followed when a property assigns or upon identifying that a property may assign.
• Ensure any outstanding debt, fees and/or charges are recovered when properties assign and before receipting notices, executing deeds or providing information on behalf of One Housing.
• Provide residents with welfare benefits advice where required and identify arrears cases where customers need additional support and liaise with the relevant sections/agencies to ensure support is obtained.
• Take firm but fair action on any resident who falls into arrears, including any legal procedures and forfeiture of the property where necessary.
• Manage and monitor residents accounts, to take action where necessary and retain a central record of all communications with the residents.
• Provide accurate information to leaseholders, freeholders, solicitors, legal representatives and mortgage lenders, in relation to the role.
• Ensure a collaborative approach between our HomeOwnership Advisors, Service Charges and Rents Team and Legal Team maximise our income collection.
• Follow recovery process to ensure maximum collection rates.
• Use MobysoftRentSense, or any other software in, to action accounts and hit targets.

What you will need to succeed

We are looking for someone who believes in working together as part of a team, who shares our values and who is positive and friendly.

The successful candidate will have:

• Good communication and negotiating skills
• Demonstrate attention to detail, accuracy and excellent organisational skills.
• Be computer literate, specifically Microsoft Word and Excel.
• Experience of working in a team to achieve high performance targets.
• Able to build effective links with all relevant stakeholders both within One Housing and externally.
• Commitment to delivering exemplary customer service.
• Knowledge of legislation around leasehold and shared ownership property.
• Understanding of leases, service charges and rents.
• Understanding of the residential conveyancing process.
• Good welfare benefits knowledge.
• Professional qualification in income collection or debt collection (desirable)

The offer

Our Life@One benefits offer you an array of perks designed with your wellbeing in mind.

• Salary: £28,000 – £32,000
• Your holidays are important to us. Take up to 28 days annual leave plus bank holidays.
• Lean travel. Spread the cost of your commute with a season ticket loans and our Cycle2Work scheme, open to all colleagues
• Looking forward to your big bucket list trip? You can buy or sell up to five days annual leave each year.
• Get paid to do good. We offer you two days off on full pay each year to volunteer in our communities.
• Well done! With our colleague recognition programme you will know when you’ve done a #greatjob
• Learning never stops. One Academy, our innovative, in-house learning and development offering is designed to help you take your career to the next level.
• We’re here for you. Our employee assistance programme offers counselling and support for you and your family 24/7.
• Stay book-smart. Take up to five paid days off per year to study toward a relevant qualification.
• Experience new things. We offer you a career break after 3 years’ continuous service.

About us

One Housing is a subsidiary of the Riverside Group. The Riverside Group was established more than 90 years ago, and is now a leading provider of affordable housing, care and support services in England and Scotland. The group manages more than 75,000 homes and operates across 160 local authorities. Riverside transforms lives by providing well maintained, high-quality housing while creating new opportunities for customers through job schemes, affordable warmth programmes, and money advice.

Working in some of the most diverse communities in the UK, we understand the strength we gain from having and supporting our diverse teams. The different skills and experiences that our colleagues from different backgrounds bring to us allow us to make better decisions, consider different views and be an altogether more interesting and cohesive place to work.

We welcome applications from everyone.

Apply today for a fulfilling career in our Customer Services team.

Please note that the application closing date is included as a guide and adverts may be withdrawn and vacancies closed before the guide date indicated. We recommend that if you are interested in applying for this role that you do not delay in submitting your application.