Land Trust Annual Review 2021: Engaging with our service charge customers

The Land Trust manages green space on eight property developments across the country on behalf of 5,000 homeowners.

Community engagement is what sets our service charge business model apart from other green space management companies and engaging with our customers throughout the Covid-19 pandemic has been incredibly important.

While Covid-19 restrictions made this far more difficult our service charge team adapted quickly, hosting resident meetings online and providing regular updates through our dedicated social media pages.

We also recognised that many of our customers may face financial hardship due to the pandemic and so offered flexible payment plans for any customers who were struggling to pay. Although we were unable to run our usual seasonal events we made great efforts to organise activities, particularly during the Christmas period when we ran a very popular storytelling event online which was attended by customers from across our service charge portfolio.

Managing the green areas on the service charge spaces is about a lot more than simply cutting the grass and picking up the litter and throughout the pandemic we have continued to deliver activities that have created significant economic and social value on our spaces.

This hard work paid off with a 50% rise in the number of people using the green spaces within our service charge developments with over 200,000 people visiting one of our sites.

When the Land Trust first decided to get involved with managing green space within service charge developments, it was because we knew we could make a really positive impact on the people that call these developments home. This has been proven throughout the Covid-19 pandemic and we are very proud of the significant difference we have made.

This positive impact was evident in the feedback we received from our service charge customers from our annual customer satisfaction survey with 70% of residents saying they used the green spaces around their home at least a few times a week and that doing so had a positive effect on their physical and mental wellbeing.