Waiting List Length
We do not have a waiting list system – These Homes is a choice-based digital letting service. Anyone can register with These Homes and apply for priority if they have a priority need to be rehoused.
We have over 3,000 live registrations. Each year we only have around 80 available properties, and of these 50% are offered to applicants who have been assessed as homeless by East Lothian Council under homeless legislation. At any one time, around 300 households on These Homes have homeless priority, which means that we only have 30-40 available properties per year for the remaining households.
In other words, we typically house less than 2% of our non-homeless applicants each year, and if we did not take any new applications to new non-homeless applicants today, it would still take over 50 years to house everyone. Of the 72 households we housed in 2021-22, the average time they had been registered with our previous allocation system was around two years, and all of them had a Priority Pass or had special circumstances (e.g. a nomination from an external agency, or a need for a specialised property). We have applicants who have been registered for more than 10 years, and still have very little chance of being rehoused with us.
