About Women’s Housing Company
The release of the Planning for the Future: New Directions for Community Housing document from the Office of Community Housing, combined with the policy framework around the provision of housing services, indicated rapid and innovative change would be required to deliver the desired outcomes. Five organisations, with a long and proud history of providing affordable and low cost housing to families and single people on limited incomes in New South Wales and is registered as a Class 1 provider with the Devision of Community Housing, collaborated together to establish BlueCHP. BlueCHP is a special purpose affordable housing development and asset management company.
The members of BlueCHP are:
- Argyle Community Housing
- Hume Community Housing
- Southern Cross Community Housing
- Wentworth Community Housing
- Women’s Housing Company
The five BlueCHP member organisations have positive working relationships with funding agencies, local government, community service organisations and the local business community ensure that they are not only able to provide a highly responsive localised tenancy and property management service for their tenants but can also tap into the latent social capital within their communities and harness it for the development of additional affordable housing. Each organisation has actively worked with their tenants and provides a range of additional services. These include well established tenant participation activities, partnership arrangements with various support agencies to assist vulnerable tenants. BlueCHP will pass on management of all acquired properties to the appropriate local community housing member.
The strategic benefits of the collaborative approach will enable it to extract the greatest leverage from the commitments made by Housing NSW through the Community Housing Growth Provider initiative. Furthermore it positions a vast portfolio and substantial resources for future additional growth beyond this particular initiative. Firstly, it creates a specialist housing development agency in which to contain development risk while allowing each of the members to remain focused on their core business - providing the highest standard of tenancy and property management services to their tenants. Secondly, because the resources committed to implement growth strategies are spread across five housing associations we will be able to extract maximum growth without undermining the financial viability of any one of the members. The creation of BlueCHP also represents the best approach to managing the significant risks associated with growth strategies.
BlueCHP will:
- Seek and create appropriate housing development and acquisition opportunities that are value for money and well located in response to identified need
- Finance affordable housing projects from government funding, private lending institutions, donations of cash, land and services
- Project manage housing constructions and acquisitions
- Provide appropriate long term housing management of these properties through its community housing members
Significantly, an increase in the supply of housing will assist to address the high demand for low cost and affordable housing for applicants within NSW.
