Lottery syndicate

Throw out your housing register, says Frank Köster, and hold a lottery to fill your homes instead. It’s not as strange as it sounds. Allocation-by-lottery is one of the latest incarnations of choice-based lettings, the system Köster invented, and it’s the norm for Rotterdam’s housing department.

Choice-based lettings took the Netherlands by storm in the 1990s and is one of the most popular Dutch exports to UK housing policy. Since April 2001, the ODPM has set up 27 pilot schemes – where tenants bid for vacant properties – and in May it declared the experiment a success.

Back in February, the government hired IT firm Scout Solutions to develop a nationwide choice-based lettings scheme – provisionally titled HEMS (Housing Employment and Mobility Services). It will merge two existing initiatives and help people find jobs in different parts of the country. A consultation on HEMS has just ended; results will be announced soon.

Choice-based lettings’ popularity in the UK and the growing number of Anglo-Dutch joint ventures has meant Köster , who is director of consultancy ICS-Advies, is in much in demand. Later this month he will speak at the National Housing Federation’s annual conference. When Housing Today met him in London last month, he had already visited a number of councils and associations eager to hear his ideas. “This morning, someone asked me where I live. I said, ‘Somewhere over the North Sea’. I’ve become a tour operator,” he jokes.

Those who hear him address the NHF conference will find him a persuasive evangelist for choice-based lettings. But before the local authority in Delft called on him to do something about its burgeoning housing register in 1981, he worked in communications and marketing for the private sector – and it shows.

“Professionals have to learn to think more like consumers,” he says. “I always start with the consumer. For consumers there are no borders – they don’t talk in terms of housing markets, they talk about properties.” Köster believes the way to unlock the stagnant rented housing market is for councils and housing associations to join together in larger choice-based lettings schemes, giving customers as much choice as possible.

Land of the brave

Although he is pleased his consumer-centric ideology has crossed over to UK landlords, he must be frustrated by the caution they display in adopting some of his more radical ideas. The Dutch have been far bolder. The country now has seven large regional schemes, which cover about 1 million properties, and work is under way on a single website to link them all. Generally the only restrictions on tenants’ choices are their incomes and the number of people in their household. The winner is the one who has been in their tenancy the longest, though in Rotterdam’s lottery, this is dispensed with completely.

In contrast, councils and housing associations that have tried out the scheme over here – including the London boroughs in the Locata scheme – generally prioritise tenants according to need.

Köster does not believe this works. “Putting people into categories gives an artificial reality. Every day, individual circumstances change. Everybody wants to improve their situation, everybody gets much more ill if it’s necessary, then society has to solve the problem,” he says.

But don’t people think lotteries are unfair? “It seems unfair but people feel it’s fair because we do not segment them according to all the individual circumstances. People never trust you if you say ‘your situation is not as bad as other people’.”

Köster does concede that while the lottery has been a hit with Rotterdam’s young people, the elderly are less impressed. As a result, the housing authority has decided to use the model only for certain homes.

Köster also believes the waiting list itself is a misleading concept. “I always say: don’t believe the waiting list, because people have to be on the waiting list or else you don’t have a chance to move. It’s us who force them to be on the list, by creating the system,” he explains. Choice-based lettings makes this even more pronounced, Köster says, because people can see what’s on the market.

Instead, landlords should treat the list as a register of customers and use it to learn more about them, in the way a supermarket would about its database of loyalty card holders. “I hope everybody will be on the waiting list, because then we know a little bit about who is intending to move,” says Köster. “If you have a database, you can do much more than waiting until they apply for a property, you can go to the customers and show what you have to offer. I believe the world is much better with less legislation and fewer preconditions, looking much more to the individual consumer.”

He says some of the most interesting consumers are 18-to-25-year-olds, and his 2003 report Surfers on the Housing Market, written for the Dutch department of housing, is a fascinating account of the technological and resulting social changes that are reshaping the housing market.

Listen to the youth

“When the invitation came to write about young people in the housing market, I said I would do it on my terms,” Köster explains.

“I will not write about how many properties we have to build – that’s not interesting. I will only write about what’s important to young people – if you look to the mass consumer market, that’s mobility and being connected. We have to build much more temporary accommodation to facilitate mobility rather than creating places to stay.”

Köster ’s report is packed with suggestions of new ways for landlords to interact with young people – from novel variations on choice-based lettings to the “WerkHotels” he pioneered. Inspired by East Thames Housing Group’s foyers, these are places for vulnerable young people to live tied to support and guaranteed employment. “It’s a new opportunity for kids to get out of the mess they’re living in,” says Köster . The first opened in Leiden in the Netherlands 18 months ago and he says it was his proudest moment.

But the idea Köster speaks most enthusiastically about is not one of his own, but from like-minded consultant Hendrik-Jan van Griensven: temporary houses in car parks that are just 40cm deep, but can be inflated when needed. “If you’re in the King’s Cross area, say, you can ring up and book one, they give you the code, you type it in and the [home’s] computer knows everything about you.”

Whether these “postbox dwellings” ever catch on – in the Netherlands or UK – remains to be seen. But Köster is determined that there be even more cross-fertilisation of ideas between the two countries, which he regards as very similar in social housing terms, if not in bravery.

He has played an instrumental role in broadening the William Sutton Trust’s informal group-structure-style alliance to include two Dutch associations, and is inviting UK organisations to suggest best practice regeneration projects for a masterclass in the Netherlands at the end of the year. “I want to make a much better world for the consumer in both places. They have so much in common – we’re a small country but we can bring you some ideas.”