Great Places Housing Group

Great Places Housing Group exists to improve the lives of the people living in our 19,000 homes across the North West and Yorkshire. We are much more than just a landlord, providing a wide-range of services and promoting partnership work to create vibrant, sustainable communities.

The Group, which is supported by approximately 600 colleagues across four regional offices (our Manchester head office, Oldham, Sheffield and Blackpool), encompasses:

  • Great Places Housing Association – providing general needs rented homes and tenancy services as well as accommodation and services that promote independence and wellbeing for some of society's most vulnerable people.
  • Plumlife – an award-winning affordable home ownership company. Plumlife helps people to fulfil their home ownership dreams through Help to Buy schemes such as Shared Ownership as well as outright sale.
  • Cube – developing quality new homes for market sale and private rent.  

Our history traces back to 1972; however, it was the merger of Manchester Methodist Housing Association and Ashiana Housing Association in 2006 that created Great Places Housing Group. 

Our achievements and ambitions

We are one of the fastest growing housing associations in the north of England and our growth is underpinned by a profit-for-purpose business model.

In 2017/18 over £33m was invested in building new homes, with 304 new homes completed in the year and another 523 homes in progress on sites across the North West.

We retain a G1/V1 rating by Homes England and have scooped numerous awards during our journey so far to deliver on our vision and live our values.

Read more about our corporate ambitions for the future. 

Great Places is proud to be a profit-for-purpose organisation

In line with our Building Greatness philosophy, we strive to be as efficient and effective as possible, and remain a top-quartile performer within the housing industry.

However, we then choose to use a significant portion of our surplus to go far beyond our landlord obligations and realise our vision of Great Homes, Great Communities, Great People.

Click here to view our informative leaflet explaining how we adopted this approach in 2016-17. 

Our vision

Our vision is clear — we are committed to creating:

  • Great homes: maximising our investment in sustainable homes 
  • Great communities: building successful, vibrant communities 
  • Great people: providing outstanding customer service and support 

Our values

Our vision is supported by the following core values:

  • We are fair, open and accountable
  • We know, respect and care about our customers
  • We appreciate the effort of everyone who works here
  • We promote partnerships, efficiency and value for money
  • We passionately embrace creativity, change and innovation