Thinking about environmental sustainability when setting up your HMO
- Clair
- May 14, 2020
- 6 min read
Updated: Oct 22, 2020
Introduction
Environmental sustainability is a global challenge. As property investors and property professionals, we must look at ways to tackle this problem across the residential property industry. To turn our properties into sustainable property investments we must thinking about the way we acquire, refurbish, and manage our property investments. In doing so we can make a huge contribution to tackling this global environmental problem. One of the fastest-growing residential trends in the UK is renting a property as a House of Multiple Occupation (HMO). In this post, we are going to look at a few ways in which you can set up your HMO in a more sustainable way.
The keys points are:
Assessing what can be re-used
Sourcing your products and furniture thoughtfully
Avoiding harmful or unnecessary packaging
Sustainable property management and tenant engagement
Other refurbishment considerations
What can be reused?
The first thing we should do when managing the refurbishment of a HMO is to look at what you can reuse. When you get the keys to your investment property there might be some old furniture, the property might be in need of modernisation, etc. Don’t just throw/rip everything out.
Can the furniture be up-cycled? There are plenty of companies that can do this for you if you don’t have time or skills to do this yourself. Even if you don’t want to keep the up-cycled furniture it can then be sold to be re-used rather than going to a waste dump.
Does the whole kitchen need to be ripped out or can the cupboard doors and worktop just be replaced giving the kitchen a whole new lease of life?
Sourcing your products thoughtfully
When sourcing new furniture for your HMO it's important to get the look right to achieve the best rents but this requirement can still be balanced with the need to source furniture sustainably. You should consider the following when bringing in new furniture:
Can you pick up anything you need second-hand? We try to look at sites like Gumtree, eBay, and Facebook for second-hand things for our property. We also consider the use of charity shops. Remember the expression, “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure”. Whilst you do need to spend some time looking online overall the process can be often quicker than waiting sometimes weeks for a furniture manufacturer to send you your goods.
If you decide to buy new furniture consider the following points:
Do the suppliers use recycled or sustainable materials?
Are you getting the most energy-efficient appliances/lighting within your budget?
Do your suppliers carbon offset / use renewable energy in their manufacturing process?
We included some links at the end to a few suppliers taking action to manage their environmental impact.
Avoiding harmful or unnecessary packaging
As Property managers, we are aware that plastic is one of the biggest challenges that we face. It is a leading cause of physical pollution introducing durable toxins into our environment. Most of this pollution is linked to single-use materials, like Styrofoam. Where possible, minimise single used packaging by requesting less to no plastic packaging when placing our order of furniture from our suppliers.
If you aren’t able to go for second hand or up-cycled furniture Ikea has been using an innovative solution to our packaging problems - Mushroom packaging. Unlike Styrofoam, Mushroom Packaging consists of 100% biodegradable and renewable material that can be recycled directly in and by nature. It also required 12% of the energy to manufacture mushroom packaging compared to typical styrofoam. It contributes to “up-cycling” by providing new value to agricultural waste that otherwise has few other uses and low value.
Equipping the house for recycling
It's important to provide designated trash bins on each property to practice sustainable waste management. All of our properties have the following bins in the kitchen and large versions at the front of the house.
General Waste
Recycling
When it comes to trash and recycling bins we keep them next to each other so tenants have both options in one place. We make sure that all waste bins and recycling bins are properly marked to avoid misuse. In bedrooms, we provide a bin which is marked “recycling only”. This encourages the tenant to separate recyclable materials from general waste.
If the property also has a garden you might want to encourage the use of a compost bin.
Sustainable property management and tenant engagement
Refurbishing and getting the property ready for being tenanted is only part of solving the problem of sustainability. If you plan to hold on to the property for many years there is a great opportunity to help your tenants and your team to use and look after the property in a more sustainable way:
Tenant communication
Good communication needs to be maintained as much as possible throughout your relationship with your tenant. If you're clear with your tenants on what is expected of them from the outset you're less likely to have any issues down the line.
Give your tenants a customised good tenant guide during your tenant check-in process and ensure their is a notice board in the property. This should include tips on things like recycling and using the thermostat responsibly.
Encourage your tenants to communicate maintenance issues to you as early as possible and ensure that you respond promptly to these issues. Typically speaking, maintenance issues generally result in some form of inefficiency within the house, the sooner it is repaired the less wastage there will be. Usually resolving a maintenance issue quickly is also more cost-effective in the long run than allowing it to evolve into a bigger problem.
Tenant engagement
You will never meet your sustainability goals just by telling your tenants they must recycle. You should explain your aims to your tenants and why you feel like the aim is important. You should then ask the tenants for ideas for managing the house in a more sustainable way. You can also encourage tenants to share these ideas with other tenants so that's not just the “bossy landlord” telling them to do something.
You can also try incentivising your tenants to save on water and power, for example, you can say to your tenants that if the power usage goes down by X% per you will reduce their rent by £X per month.
Another tip is ask a tenant to nominate themselves to be the houses sustainability champion. They can help organise bin management and be on the lookout for further improvements in the house. You could give them a modest financial incentive for helping with this.
Inspections
Regular inspections of your property are key. There will also be some tenants that don’t report damage and maintenance issues to you. An inspection is an opportunity for you to identify these problems. It also a chance for you to review the property for any improvements which could be made to make the property more efficient.
Heating management - there are a number of smart thermostats on the market which once installed can reduce the amount of heating used. This is good for the environment and for your wallet. We use time-o-stat in our properties because they have been designed with HMO tenants in mind. We will do another article about these great little gadgets in a future blog post.
Cleaning
Cleaning isn’t the most obvious thing to consider in your sustainability strategy but it's actually quite important. Your cleaners see your properties regularly, therefore, they keep you informed about what is going on in the property eg is a large proportion of the rubbish always going into the landfill bin instead of the recycling bin, is the heating always on when the windows are left open. You can then use this information to communicate with the tenants.
Another thing to consider with cleaning are the materials your cleaners use, is it possible for them to change to products which contain more natural ingredients? The difference in cost between natural and chemical-based products is often negligible and the more everyone uses these products, the more the cost will go down.
Other refurbishment considerations
There are many other things which to consider to make the property more energy efficient including:
Installing solar panels
Upgrading the boilers and appliances
Energy-saving lights and switches
Draft proofing the property and adding insulation to make the property
These options are not appropriate for every refurbishment of HMO property so we won’t go into details on these during this post but you can use the links at the end of the article to find more information.
Conclusion
Setting up and running a HMO can have a surprisingly wide negative impact on the wide environment if done poorly. As urbanisation continues and HMO’s become increasingly commonplace, it's important all property investors and property managers take action and put procedures in place that help to mitigate this impact. Some small changes across your portfolio and future investments will make big impact in tackling the sustainability challenges the planet faces. If you’d more information or would like to work with us on sustainable property investments please get in touch.
Links and resources:
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