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Tasked with building secure, affordable housing in London, the team at Wandle turns to Multivista for efficiency and future compliance.

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How to build affordable, safe, secure homes for tenants to build successful futures

The challenge

How to build affordable, safe, secure homes for tenants to build successful futures

Founded in 1967, Wandle is a south London-based housing association managing over 7500 homes. They build and provide affordable homes for rent, shared ownership, outright sale, and affordable housing. An industry leader on proactive building safety and remediation, Wandle’s aim is to “continue to focus on supporting people across south London who need a home, providing homes to be proud of, and services residents can trust.

“Historically, projects have issues with trying to find construction data and the information on what’s behind the walls,” says Wandle Development Manager Elizabeth Nakyanzi.

“You rely on contractor evidence,” adds Building Safety and Compliance Lead, Christine Turner. “Something is described as ‘as-built’ and all the information comes from that, but strong evidence comes from having a visual representation…where you can actually see the work.”

“There are some really good contractors out there,” says Jeremy Arnold, Wandle Head of Development, “but more often than not, things get missed.” Jeremy adds that if issues are not caught early, they can become costly and inconvenient for future residents. “If someone has done something wrong on the top of a building, it doesn’t take long – a few years down the line – when that leak that occurs affects the whole building.”

To ensure they were delivering the best buildings possible to their residents and communities, Wandle needed visual evidence – accessible during construction and afterwards – that what was supposed to be built was actually built and built to the regulatory standards.

The solution

Multivista reality capture provides photographic evidence at key stages of work

To help the Wandle teams track progress and memorialize exactly what was built, where, and when, Multivista London reality capture specialists came on site to visually document existing conditions at key milestones like before slabs are poured or systems in walls and ceilings get covered up.  

“Photographs,” says Russell Reddish, Clerk of Works. ‘They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and in this case, you can’t argue with the photographs.” 

“It’s so useful,” agrees Wandle Executive Director of Property, Yinka Bolaji. “To allow us to capture lots of information on our properties from day zero. It gives us the data we need and puts us in a good position to start from and therefor save money as well.” 

Part of what impressed the Wandle team the most about Multivista’s photo reality capture was the timing, working with the project schedule, team, and trades to be sure to document the important elementscrucial elements of the build at the right time. Regulatory expectations have changed across the United Kingdom, which now mandates residential project teams maintain a “Golden Thread” or digital record of important safety information—from design through construction and into the operation phase of a building. Using Multivista reality capture, Wandle was able to adhere to the Golden Thread in practice, not in theory.  

“For the Golden Thread we need information,” says Yaseen Akhtar, Building Safety Delivery Manager. “We need photographic evidence of key stages of works, of inspections carried out from the relevant fire engineers and relevant bodies that come out onto the site. Multivista captures key moments of works we are replacing – existing cladding, existing systems, and the replacements and the new. That builds information we can use in the future for compliance as well.” 

Partnering with Multivista ensures Wandle has clear, third-party evidence of how their projects came together, with benefits embedded across the lifecycle – development, remediation, and asset management. 

Online information for multiple stakeholders 

The best data on the planet is no good if the right people can’t access it. With Multivista, all of Wandle’s reality capture imagery and information was tied to geo-spots on their project floorplans and uploaded to a single, cloud-based platform with unlimited access for as many Wandle team members as need it. 

“With Multivista, it’s not just a collaboration,” says Jeremy Arnold. “It’s our superpower. The photos geo-tagged across the whole development are great, but it is the system that sits behind it, it’s very usable and made a lot of sense and we felt that work for us.” 

With all their project reality capture collected in one place, with the ability to add photos, notes and annotations created by their own team members, Wandle was able to use Multivista as-built photos to see what work had been done in real time as well as archive a record of exactly how the project was built for future maintenance, repair, or renovation. 

“With Multivista’s digital platform,” says Yaseen Akhtar. “Wherever I am – I’ll be sitting on the train – I can pull up my phone, and I can log in and see – this is in the works that’s taking place on this day, this week. It’s all good, a contractor doing it, but where you’re own due diligence? You should be checking yourself.” 

Return on investment

Proof of quality and peace of mind 

Under the new regulatory rules of the UK, it’s no longer enough to simply build a quality project; you have to be able to prove it. With Multivista on site every week or two, memorializing exact as-built project data and images, teams at Wandle are able to perform quality control on their teams and trades in real time, catch issues before they escalate, and ensure they have clear, greatly reduce destructive discovery costs if an issue does arise down the road, and ensure their organization has third-party evidence to reduce future liability, dispute, and audit risk. 

But most importantly to Wandle, it’s the value brought to their end customers, the residents. 

“They’re going to be living in these homes,” Jeremy says. “And they’re going to be using these homes for many years. It’s a quality aspect, and anything that may have slipped through in the defects period, Multivista is giving us x-ray vision as to what is behind the wall and what is behind the sink or the shower. That allows us to deal with any problems quickly and efficiently, that minimizes disruption to our residents. It also costs us less when we’re trying to investigate and remedy something, and then extra costs don’t get passed onto the residents.” 

“We exist to provide a solution,” adds Yinka Bolaji, Wandle Executive Director of Property. “We are social landlords, so we want these homes to be affordable. We want them to be safe and secure. We want our tenants to be able to use their homes and build a future for themselves.” 