Comm Comm’s added value in supporting clients and communities
Find out more about what a resident liaison officer’s role is, and how they can help you manage resident relationships during works in occupied homes
A resident liaison officer (or RLO) is a named person who holds the resident relationship while construction, maintenance or repair work takes place in, or around, occupied homes. They coordinate access, handle complaints on site, support vulnerable residents and report back to you. Comm Comm places RLOs into housing association, council, contractor and retrofit programmes across the construction, refurbishment, planned maintenance and regeneration phases of projects.
Your resident satisfaction score is judged behind the front doors that nobody from head office is standing at.
A resident who cannot get an answer refuses an appointment. A complaint nobody catches on site arrives weeks later as a formal one. Letters go to a household that cannot read them, so the visit is missed. And a wellbeing concern inside a home nobody has visited goes unrecorded until it grows into something larger.
All of it happens in the homes you manage and, in your organisation’s name, and most of it reaches you long after the point where five minutes at the door would have settled it.
Somebody has to own the resident conversation
The resident conversation happens on a live scheme whether anyone has been given the job of holding it (or not!). Housing officers take the calls between their own casework. Site managers negotiate at the door when a resident will not let them in.
An RLO is the person whose job that is to smooth this relationship. In Comm Comm’s own words, the role is to act as the bridge between residents, contractors and clients, ensuring projects run efficiently while residents feel informed, supported and respected throughout the process.
On a scheme affecting occupied homes, the RLO covers:
access and appointment coordination with residents whose homes are being worked in and around
home visits and welfare checks
complaint handling and resolutions on site, with early escalation where it is needed
enhanced care plans, safeguarding escalation, priority scheduling and multi-agency liaison for vulnerable households
decanting support, including one-to-one meetings and early housing needs assessments
resident newsletters, drop-in sessions, estate initiatives and community consultation events
satisfaction surveys and reporting back to you
Who carries the risk when works run in and around occupied homes?
Whoever is responsible for the resident experience is accountable to it. That person is usually at the end of the phone, in an office miles away from the doorstep where it is decided. Comm Comm supports housing associations, local authorities, main contractors and facilities management companies.
Landlords carry the most exposure. You own the homes and the tenant relationship long after the scaffolding comes down. Their experience during the work surfaces later as a satisfaction score, sometime during an audit or an inquiry. Let’s work together to improve this.
Contractors working in occupied social or privately rented homes
Refurbishment, retrofit, planned maintenance and fire safety contractors carry resident liaison obligations, without always providing the headcount to meet them. Comm Comm provides dedicated project liaison teams to maintain the resident relationship on site, so the programme keeps moving and the client relationship that results in the next contract award stays intact.
House builders at handover
Comm Comm also supports house builders in the handover stage, who need a person on the ground for snagging, aftercare and maintenance support for occupiers. The service covers decanting, construction, occupation, maintenance and aftercare, so resident contact continues long after the construction team leaves.
Resident friction turns into programme days
A missed deadline or a refused entry for some work costs a day on site, and it costs again when the trade returns. One unanswered complaint becomes several, because the resident tells their neighbours before anyone at your organisation has heard about it. Effective liaison helps reduce complaints, delays and access refusals.
On one of the regeneration projects Comm Comm is supporting on (a large social housing provider), complaints have reduced significantly and miscommunication across the community has decreased. Delays linked to resident concerns and access issues have reduced, and participation in consultations has increased. The RLO catches issues early and answers within agreed timescales, which is a positive commitment your customer care team can evidence.
Safeguarding and wellbeing concerns also get identified earlier, because somebody is working with residents often enough to notice. The RLO passes resident feedback back to you, so you can correct the service while the programme is still running and intervene early where a household needs support. When you’re scored on satisfaction and consumer standards, that reporting is evidence you can put in front of a board.
A home visit found a resident about to refuse access
On a recent scheme, our RLO found an elderly tenant extremely distressed about the redevelopment and considering refusing access for surveys. The RLO also identified memory loss. Working with the tenant’s family, they agreed on a plan: key messages repeated as often as they were needed, one consistent point of contact, a direct telephone number added to the tenant’s list of important contacts, and home visits timed to arrive alongside key correspondence so correspondence could be explained in person. Weekly welfare checks followed.
A satisfaction survey would have found it months later, after the access was refused and the programme had moved on without them.
The RLO identified language and accessibility needs as barriers at the start of that scheme, and now communicates timelines and milestones multilingually, with reasonable adjustments for residents who need them. A letter nobody can read produces a missed appointment first and a complaint second.
LET US SUPPORT YOU TO WORK BETTER WITH YOUR RESIDENTS AND COMMUNITIES
Tell us about your project, and we will tell you what maintaining that resident relationship would take, including how many people it needs and where they would be best placed. We scope engagement to suit your programme and work on fixed price model for reliable budgeting.
Comm Comm has supported clients with planning consultation, community engagement and construction communications for more than 13 years and played a significant role in the consent for over 6,000 new homes in 2025.
If you have a planning, construction, major works or decanting project on the horizon, speak to us about how we can support you and your community to be better connected, better supported and better served.