NHMF Awards 2025
The NHMF Awards recognise those projects and people that excel in improving quality and efficiency. The Awards showcase how social landlords and contractors are innovating and making an impact – improving efficiency and the service to tenants while reducing operating costs and working towards net zero carbon goals.
Congratulations to the Winners
- Best Net Zero Carbon Initiative: Wolverhampton & Wates
- Most Innovative Property Service: Progress HA & Voicescape
- Best Customer Impact: North Star & Infinity Group
- Delegates’ choice: Southern HA & Chas Berger
- Apprentice of the Year: Callum Abdallah, Evolve Facility
- Rising Star Award: Dan Hale, Ian Williams
Introduction
The NHMF Awards recognise those projects and people that excel in improving quality and efficiency. The Awards showcase how social landlords and contractors are innovating and making an impact – improving efficiency and the service to tenants while reducing operating costs and working towards net zero carbon goals. The 2025 Conference brought housing maintenance and asset management professionals together to explore the theme of ‘CLARITY’, focusing on responses that make an impact to the evolving challenges while staying grounded in the essentials. Its key themes were:
- Building Safety
- Healthy Homes
- Net Zero
- Technology
- Skills and Training
Both the winners and shortlisted schemes were of a high standard showing how innovation, technology, and partnership working between landlords, supply chains and residents could improve performance, customer service, efficiency and reduce operating costs. All entries
provided clear evidence of the benefits to residents, landlords and the wider community from best practice. The NHMF’s mission is to help the sector learn by sharing what works and what does not. It wants to provide CLARITY to the sector when it is facing so many demands so that it can improve its service to customers and meet all its regulatory requirements.
These Awards (Winners and shortlisted entries) show how the sector can improve efficiency, reduce unnecessary costs, innovate, and utilise technology to ensure residents live in homes fit for the 21st Century. Homes that are safe, warm, and healthy.
What were the common themes from the Awards winners?
- Recognising the need to change how the sector is operating to provide the service and the homes residents need and expect. By improving its service, the sector will meet what is required to keep residents safe, healthy, and warm.
- Technology, including the use of AI is helping the sector both improve its service and be able to better engage with residents. For example, technology enabled one landlord to simplify its processes and place the resident at the heart of its new system. They created a single, data rich view of every customer so they received enhanced asset management services. This ensured that all compliance checks for each home were managed and no remedial work was missed. The new system reduced the time and resource spent by the team so that it could manage more in house. A similar outcome was reported by another winner who used technology to increase appointments and reduce ‘no-access’ rates to improve statutory compliance.
- Innovation helped one landlord undertake essential building safety remedial work and also improve energy efficiency on a site where access was very challenging. As well as meeting the Building Safety Act requirements, the landlord invested for the long-term so that future maintenance and replacement costs will be reduced. The energy efficiency work is expected to deliver reduced fuel bills for residents. The landlord collaborated with its service providers to develop the innovative approach required to deliver this project.
- Decarbonisation must still be a long-term requirement for landlords in spite of so many other demands, such as meeting building and fire safety requirements, remedying damp and mould and improving tenant satisfaction. The Net Zero Carbon Award showcased how landlords are approaching this, with the winner adopting a bold ‘worst-first’ approach that focused on its hardest-to-treat system-built homes. By collaborating with its supply chain enabled continual improvement and efficiency in how they designed and delivered the energy efficiency measures, saving time and costs. The project also enabled the supply chain to develop the skills required for retrofit. Improving supply chain capability for retrofit and decarbonisation projects was also illustrated by the Rising Star Award winner. The Net Zero Carbon winner also demonstrated the importance of aligning retrofit work with its neighbourhood regeneration and planned maintenance, so that it upgraded properties in phases based on location and construction type. The project reduced heat demand by at least 50%, reducing residents’ energy bills and enhancing their comfort. It used IoT monitoring to send real-time data to enable preventive action to be taken.
- People – the Apprentice and Rising Star Awards demonstrated the impact having people with the right qualities – willingness, initiative, ability to learn, desire to improve skills and to share knowledge, as well as being willing to accept more responsibility. The winners showed the importance of having a customer focus, treating everyone with respect.
What can the sector learn from the NHMF Awards?
- All the approaches and technology used by these schemes can be used by others. This is an important part of assessing all the entries which had to address this question. It is designed to inspire and to demonstrate the wider relevance of each Award winner for the sector.
- Benefits of showcasing and sharing best practice, innovation and technology so the sector can learn from what other organisations are doing. Sharing best practice is the NHMF’s mission so the sector can improve its performance in managing and maintaining its residents’ homes.
- Collaboration and long-term partnerships offer opportunities to improve and innovate.
Where can I find out more?
