1 WHAT DETERMINES ASSET MANAGEMENT APPROACHES IN THE SOCIAL RENTED SECTOR? Vincent Gruis*, Nico Nieboer** and Tim Brown*** * Faculty of Architecture, Delft University of Technology, PO Box 5043, NL – 2600 GA Delft, the Netherlands E-mail: v.h.gruis@tudelft.nl ** OTB Research Institute for Housing, Urban and Mobility Studies, Delft University of Technology, PO Box 5030, NL – 2600 GA Delft, the Netherlands E-mail: n.e.t.nieboer@tudelft.nl ***Centre for Comparative Housing Research, De Montfort University, The Gateway, GB - Leicester LE1 9BH, Great Britain E-mail: timothy.brown1@which.net Paper to be presented at the ENHR Conference in Tirana, 26-28 May 2003 Abstract Throughout Europe and Australia, changes in housing policies and markets set considerable challenges for the asset management of social landlords. In the past, social housing was mainly concerned with the development of new dwellings. Management of the housing stock consisted first of all of day-to-day maintenance and administration. Strategic decisions about investments in the housing stock were made mostly by governments, rather than by individual landlords. Now, landlords in many countries are faced with the challenge to develop their own strategies, although in some countries more prominent than others. To cope with these challenges, landlords have to develop new approaches towards their asset management. However, being a relatively new topic in the social rented sector, international research about the asset management of social landlords is scarce. Therefore, the ENHR Working Group on Housing Management has started a comparative research project in which the asset management practice within various European countries and Australia is being described and compared. The central research questions of this project are: - How do social landlords in different countries formulate strategies for the management of their housing stock? - What are the relations between the landlords’ practice and their national context? - What systems and methods are applied for asset management, what methods can be applied elsewhere and what knowledge can be usefully exchanged and disseminated?