What Makes A Strong Repayment Agreement

Poorly managed agreements can create work, drain resources and put debt at risk. The challenges with agreements stem from a lack of systems to track and manage them. Whilst macro factors (such as the Cost of Living crisis) can exacerbate the issue of indebtedness, leading to potentially more agreements being needed or created, it isn’t the root of the problem with agreements as a tool. With this in mind, your repayment agreements could be working smarter, not harder, to better support today’s tenants. 

 At HQN RIEN 2025, Voicescape’s Ste Lawrence tackled this very topic. He talked about why a new way of working with your tenant agreements can help you collect income at a lower operational cost, simply by adopting a new approach to tenant engagement. 

 In this blog, we summarise our research findings and discuss how technology and behavioural science can help drive income collection and safeguard your agreements. 

Contents 

• How much of your debt sits within agreements?
• What challenges can badly managed agreements cause?
• What should be included in an agreement?
• How to manage agreements? Introducing Agreements Manager 

How much of your debt sits within agreements? 

To understand the scale of the issue, we explored how much debt sits within agreements. Our research shows that its 25-50% of the total debt of housing associations.  

Higher arrears result in more workload and pressure on officers. Whilst informal agreements don’t cause arrears to increase quickly, it’s the lack of management of these agreements that does. This can mean that arrears are still climbing with organisations believing they have a mechanism for control in place, which is not working. 

It’s for this reason that we created a solution dedicated to agreements. Current systems can't handle agreements, and using spreadsheets or notes in HMS is not effective when it comes to logging or tracking them. In many cases, landlords need more than a housing management system for repayments – which very rarely give visibility over or accurately track agreements. Alongside increased visibility, Agreements Manager helps you reduce break rates and target arrears with less effort for a far better tenant and officer experience.  

What challenges can badly managed agreements cause? 

Badly managed agreements ultimately cause more work – a cycle of constantly making, breaking and chasing agreements. Left alone, it can lead to challenges with: 

• Handling multiple payment frequencies from multiple sources at different points in time – Teams typically can’t keep on top of repayments. 

• Further progression of debt – Lack of visibility means teams are left asking questions like, “How much debt is wrapped up in agreements?” and “When do these end?” In actuality, agreements could be drifting, broken or changed due to a shift in tenant circumstances. 

• Inaccuracies with creating and monitoring agreements – This could include incorrect data, fields and overrides. 

 After analysing 30 landlords over five years, we deduced that:  

• The average duration of an agreement is 2.4 years
• The average range of each agreement amount is £500 - £700 (with the average repayment instalment value being £10 per week)

Over the last few years of our research and insights project, we discovered that, in theory, agreements are a powerful tool to secure arrears and maintain tenancies. With the right approach, they can efficiently help tenants meet their repayments.

What should be included in an agreement? 

Aside from repayment amounts and contract schedules, organisations should be able to have the ability to have a consultation about agreement length and installment amounts, to get a better commitment from the tenant. 

Agreements Manager will recommend certain lengths and values based on risk level and agreements context.  

For example: the average repayment instalment → <£10 per week. Whereas, for court-mandated agreements (e.g. £4.65 court mandated), the system will not alter the amount recommended or length; as this completely decided by the courts.  

On average, 90% of agreements fail within 3-6 months and up to 50% of arrears are tied up in them. This signals a much larger issue – one regarding tenant support. Based on the Sheffield Hallam ‘Holding on to Homes’ study, we discovered that 70% of tenants are struggling with arrears, or at risk, and need that additional support to help move things along.  

This means it’s essential to include the right tenant approach in your repayment agreement moving forward. Through behavioural science, we created the ‘Golden Moments’ framework, a practical guide on communicating with tenants to produce the best, most desired outcome. We recommend incorporating this into your approach to increase the success of your agreements. 

How to manage agreements? Introducing Agreements Manager 

Whilst there will always be challenges with agreements, housing providers need a better way to deal with them. That’s why we decided to create a powerful tool to promote tenancy sustainability. Blending innovation with empathy, Agreements Manager offers a new way of viewing and managing tenant agreements – it's like having a team of people to review every agreement every day to ensure it's on track. With our solution, we can help you better support your tenants during current and upcoming challenges. 

With Agreements Manager, you can: 

• Reduce break rates and recover arrears faster
• Analyse real customer behaviour and get actionable insights
• Set up automated notifications for consistent tenant engagement
• Use our risk-profiling recommendations for each tenant
• Act with clear visibility and get a historic view of your agreements

We know how important it is to make sure you’re getting the best results from using a new tool. We are more than happy to guide you through our solution and see if we can help you better manage your agreements. Get in touch with us today to discuss further how we can support you and your tenants.