A unique partnership between scale-up and government, now available to all
Novoville was selected by the City of Edinburgh Council to solve the challenge of carrying out the maintenance and repairs of shared areas in housing blocks. This initiative was part of the Scottish Government-backed CivTech Accelerator programme, which harnesses entrepreneurial tech innovation to solve specific public sector challenges.
Novoville’s response is to completely integrate the market for repairs and maintenance in the locality. By directly engaging traders, the council, homeowners and other stakeholders, and providing them with a dedicated ecosystem where they can each play their part, Novoville streamlines and simplifies dealing with a major source of issues for the city and its residents alike.
The Novoville Shared Repairs app encourages, supports and enables private owners of a unit (a flat or a shop) in a block (tenement) to proactively take responsibility for planning and organising repairs, and carrying it out in accordance with local rules and regulations. The system also helps councils address their challenges both as a competent authority, and as the landlord of thousands of social units in the area. Property managers (factors), surveyors and housing associations are also included in the ecosystem, and have hailed the project as a game-changer for their industry.
Are you interested in improving the property condition of private and/or shared buildings in your locality? Get in touch to see how our technology can work for you.
Διαχείριση αιτημάτων & διαδραστικοί χάρτες
Homeowners and landlords
The Novoville Shared Repairs app is an end-to-end solution taking all the hassle out of shared repairs.
From organising your ‘virtual tenement’, reporting issues to other owners, getting quotations from traders, voting, and eventually hiring and paying the trusted contractors you choose – Novoville has laid out the entire process for you. You can now fix your house without leaving your home.
Novoville Shared Repairs dramatically speeds up decision-making, eliminates many of the complexity and friction associated with coming to an agreement amongst owners, and increases transparency between all participants.
Local councils or authorities
You can support us and we can support you. We would love to understand what your local issues are in housing, the services (if any) you offer to private homeowners, or if you operate Trusted Traders schemes or equivalent. With your help, we could deploy much more effectively in your area.
Our solution is also a chance for you to access a brand new data set, rich in insight about the overall condition of buildings in your area. All the data generated and actions taken in our system are aggregated, and anonymised city-wide data about ongoing cases of shared repairs is available to the authorities to make better policy decisions.
Furthermore, if you own housing stock (either wholly or in part), you can deploy the app as the ideal communication and engagement solution for repairs & maintenance. No more paper. No more lengthy procedures. Homeowners can now do the bulk of the heavy lifting for you, as per their responsibilities.
Finally, if you offer any services to help homeowners carry out common repairs (such as ownership information, missing shares schemes, council share applications), you can offer them directly in the app by designing your forms on our management dashboard. It’s all very easy.
Got another idea? Let’s see how we can make it happen.
Διαχείριση αιτημάτων & διαδραστικοί χάρτες
Construction professionals
Our solution has been designed not just to make homeowner’s lives easier, but to respond to some of the most important concerns of the trading professions involved in shared repairs.
Novoville Shared Repairs is an opportunity for contractors to get more qualified business on a more even playing field. It makes sure homeowners are organised by the time they get in touch. It allows you to represent your best work. It even ensures you get paid faster with a fully digitised payment procedure. But this is just the start. Together we can explore how to make the best use of our system to further reduce your operational costs.
Already, we are indebted to the many tradesmen who have contributed to the vision of this product and contributed their time to informing us about their day-to-day work, their needs, and their concerns. You’re key to further helping us along the right path. We will need your comments and feedback on what’s already out there on an ongoing basis.
If you’d like to know more or ask any questions, please contact us.
Property Factors
Property factors want to reduce the administrative burden they face and invest more time engaging with clients, rather than reacting to issues. With our solution, communication and engagement with owners around repairs and maintenance is a breeze. Take votes, propose repairs, gather opinions, contact everyone from one place and keep everything organised: this will make a major difference to your business’ level of service while lowering your operational costs (postage, billing, organising meetings, etc.).
We are currently piloting specific new features with partners in the factoring industry. If you’re interested in participating (and get significant discounts on things developed!), get in touch.
Διαχείριση αιτημάτων & διαδραστικοί χάρτες
Surveyors
Have you given up on working on shared repairs? Are you wasting time helping owners navigate the process? Have you missed out on payments because of a recalcitrant owner? This is what we’ve heard from many of you already.
Novoville Shared Repairs will bring you qualified business and time-savings by helping owners organise themselves before they reach out to you. You can advertise and sell condition surveys to tenement owners directly in the app, increase your chances of being hired to project manage a large repair, keep everything in one system which acts both as a dropbox for your files and a client-engagement portal.
For now, the Shared Repairs app signposts to the RICS and RIAS websites, without further integration. But we can go much further, and quickly. We can create an immediate conduit between you and our virtual tenements to increase how much qualified business you receive. You can also use our system to procure contractors and take votes on quotes yourselves. Bit-by-bit we could transform the whole journey, end-to-end.
Anyone else?
If you’re a construction specialist or consultant, property manager, lawyer, from a housing association, please get in touch. We’re on a mission to turn nightmares into dreams when it comes to looking after property, particularly when that hinges on everyone playing their part in the process.
We may be focused on Scotland for the time being, but we’re exploring other areas as well – in the rest of the United Kingdom and beyond. Wherever you come from, tell us about your use case and we’ll tell you how we can help.
Novoville citiesare performing better
Interaction between local governments and citizens becomes immediate, efficient and cost-effective.