Throughout Europe and Australia, changes in housing policies and markets set considerable challenges for the asset management of social landlords. In the past, social housing was mainly concerned with the development of new dwellings. Management of the housing stock consisted first of all of day-to-day maintenance and administration. Strategic decisions about investments in the housing stock were made mostly by governments, rather than by individual landlords. Now, landlords in many countries are faced with the challenge to develop their own strategies, although in some countries more prominent than others. To cope with these challenges, landlords have to develop new approaches towards their asset management. However, being a relatively new topic in the social rented sector, international research about the asset management of social landlords is scarce. Therefore, the ENHR Working Group on Housing Management has started a comparative research project in which the asset management practice within various European countries and Australia is being described and compared. The central research questions of this project are: - How do social landlords in different countries formulate strategies for the management of their housing stock? - What are the relations between the landlords¿ practice and their national context? - What systems and methods are applied for asset management, what methods can be applied elsewhere and what knowledge can be usefully exchanged and disseminated? In this paper we describe our conceptual framework for this research project and give a general and provisional answer to the first two of the questions mentioned above. We define asset management in a social housing context by describing its objectives as well as the activities which construct asset management. Based on business theory we set up a typology of possible approaches towards asset management. We construct a hypothetical model about the relations between landlords¿ management practice and their national housing context. We apply this model to social landlords in the Netherlands and England to test our preliminary assumptions and the usefulness of the model.@en

As part of a more general trend towards privatisation, deregulation and decentralisation of public tasks, housing policy in several Western and Eastern European countries aims to reinforce market-orientation in the social housing system. These reforms had a large impact on the asset management of public and social landlords. In the past, social housing was mainly concerned with the development of new dwellings. Management of the housing stock consisted first of all of day-to-day maintenance and administration. Strategic decisions about investments in the housing stock were mostly made by governments, rather than by individual landlords. Now, landlords in many countries are faced with the challenge to develop their own strategies. Although the precise effects on stock investment and allocation are yet to be determined, we may expect a more dynamic stock policy and an increased importance of market and financial considerations. In this paper, asset management in the Dutch social housing sector is described. The paper deals with rent policy, housing allocation and investment policy. Special attention is paid to rationalisation of decision making about the development of the housing stock. Recent research in this area shows various innovations, but also indicates that the formulation of a strategic asset management is still in its infancy.@en