Shining a light on Hillcrest’s heroes: development

Today, our spotlight casts it’s glow on a Hillcrest team who many may say are the bricks and mortar of the organisation, working to create the properties that our tenants call home. Introducing the development team.

For the first time in modern history, Covid-19 brought all construction work to a halt meaning the team found themselves in some very unfamiliar territory. Rather than flounder however, the team took this unprecedented situation by the scruff of the neck and immediately engaged with our finance department to monitor the economic impact to the organisation and offered support to our various contractors.

The team quickly turned their focus to helping others, working with our contractors to source PPE for our frontline Hillcrest Futures and Maintenance teams to use to help limit the spread of the virus.

With construction halted, but the team still dedicated to working towards delivering affordable homes and supporting the government’s targets, they worked on some “off the shelf” purchases for ready-built homes through the open market. They also continued to work with developers to investigate and plan speculative development projects.

With the country gradually moving towards getting moving again, the team’s focus shifted onto the significant task of preparing for work to restart on site. This involved a lot of new planning, procedures and risk assessments in order to minimise the threat of Covid-19 to site staff and the public. As part of this our clerks of works also inspected all of our current live development sites to check and monitor the new infection control procedures.

With our various development projects working to tight timetables, the disruption caused by the pandemic has also had a big impact on this. The team has quickly had to revise these schedules on a wide scale alongside the contractors to create up to date timetables and allow the team to report back to local authorities and other partners on the revised completion dates.

Throughout the pandemic, the development team has remained dedicated to overcoming the challenging hurdles in order to continue delivering good quality affordable homes. Although they work largely behind the scenes, their efforts have been fantastic and will ultimately provide more homes for individuals and families of all sizes.