Our History
Albyn Housing Society Limited serves an ever-growing number of communities in the Highlands, providing good quality, affordable housing for thousands of people across the region. Through nearly five decades the Society has listened and responded to the views of its customers, local government, communities and businesses in meeting housing needs in the Highlands.
Our history
Albyn Housing Society began in 1973 by building homes for the incoming workers at Invergordon smelter. The 1980s saw the Society building to complement local authority housing in six District Council areas. In the 1990s 400 properties and tenants joined the Society by voluntary transfer from Scottish Homes. Partnership working with the Highland Council (and others) has been a major feature of the early years of the 21st century, producing significant new provision.
What we do
Today, we manage over 3,800 properties in 70 communities across the Highlands. From origins of a handful of staff the Society now has over 90 employees and has two offices; the registered office in Invergordon and a second office in Inverness. Our growth has seen the formation of our two subsidiary companies; Albyn Enterprises Ltd and Highland Residential Inverness.
Highland Residential Inverness expands the services and tenures we can offer our customers. As well as social rented housing, we also facilitate mid-market rent and low-cost ownership initiatives. Highland Residential Inverness also offers quality and affordable factoring services.
Albyn Enterprises Ltd supports Albyn's innovation activities, such as developing new solutions to enable people to live independently at home longer.
The Society strives to perform well as a customer-focused, innovative and equal-opportunities based business. We aim to exceed the performance standards required by The Scottish Housing Regulator and the auditors contracted to undertake internal and external audits of our activities. During recent years the Society has made innovations in providing more energy efficient homes including both new build homes and improvements to stock, to make our housing more affordable to live in.
We are dedicated to maintaining and building homes and supporting communities in the Highlands. Doing so in a way which puts quality, affordability and sustainability at the forefront of its efforts, by recognising the wider impact of housing for the people of the Highlands. Appropriately, significant investment goes into ensuring that tenants with changing needs can remain in their homes through adaptations.
We welcome and encourage customer and client feedback and our structure allows for participation at all levels. Find out how you can get involved.
Our vision
Maintain and build quality homes, providing excellent customer service, and giving opportunities for people and communities to flourish.
Our values
- Being caring
- Being adaptable
- Being professional
Our Strategic Objectives
Our homes - We will provide high quality, affordable, sustainable, and energy-efficient homes by implementing an asset management strategy driven by tactical analysis of data and targeted investment
Our customers – We will streamline our customers’ journey and improve customer satisfaction by developing a Customer Experience Strategy to deliver a truly brilliant customer experience. Underpinning this strategy will be the successful implementation of Project Phoenix, delivering on our digital transformation agenda, to enable our customers more flexibility in how they interact with us to ensure that every customer is supported and valued.
Our people – Our working culture is respectful, effective, engaging, and inclusive and driven by our tenants’ needs. We embrace agile and flexible working and the lessons we are learning from COVID 19, enabling cultural change, and driving the people agenda.
Our finances – We will be efficient and effective stewards of our tenants’ money and charitable resources to enable the delivery of affordable, quality services for our tenants. We will support the business to invest in stock improvement, systems, and our people
Our partnerships - We will use our expertise to influence social housing policy and develop partnerships across the Highlands that add value to our communities