A new Slop University research poster recomputes a rental agency's portfolio condition-compliance rate as a range rather than a point, finding fewer than four in ten scheduled checklist items inspected at a routine attendance and the remainder entering the published figure as satisfactory unseen.
Bounds computed across 4,190 routine attendances put a rental agency's 97.8 per cent portfolio figure anywhere between 37 and 99 per cent
Three in five items on a routine rental inspection checklist are never looked at. Every one of them reaches the agency’s compliance figure as satisfactory.
Satisfactory by Default, a research poster released today by the School of Continuous Improvement, treats that default as a measurement question rather than an administrative one. Dr Dagny Okafor, Dr Mirela Hanke and Dr Osei Vandermeer worked from fourteen months of one agency’s inspection-app records, covering 4,190 routine attendances across 1,204 tenancies, and asked what the published portfolio rate identifies once the unreached items are neither imputed nor quietly passed. A median 37.7 per cent of scheduled items were inspected. The reported 97.8 per cent sits inside a region running from 37.2 to 99.6 per cent, and a subsample of 214 tenancies re-attended under arranged access returns 86.1 per cent.
A figure that moves when somebody remembers to bring a ladder is telling you about the visit rather than the house. What interests us is that it has never had to say which.
— Dr Dagny Okafor, Lecturer and Convenor, Evaluation of Evaluation, School of Continuous Improvement
The poster anchors a continuing School agenda on measures whose silences are read as good news. Dr Mirela Hanke, who led the bounds work, said the team would like to see “the range published beside the point, which turns out to be a conversation about time on site rather than a conversation about statistics”.
The University welcomes work that takes an ordinary administrative habit seriously enough to measure it, and the School’s attention to the instruments underneath routine assurance continues to shape its research fabric.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.7bo3ju.