Cornwall Council is seeking an understanding of interest across the Voluntary, charity, social lettings, Independent and private sectors for the provision of a private lets service.

This service is currently run in house, and provides settled accommodation through Assured Short-hold tenancy negotiated between tenants and private landlords.

The tenants for these services would be those in temporary accommodation, owed a prevention, relief duty, rough sleepers and former rough sleepers, as well as those who are threatened with homelessness under notice.

The landlords are private individuals who choose to use the service in lieu of a high street agency.

For clarity, the requirement does not involve the provision of purpose built or managed facilities - on one level it is simply an agency service, matching tenants to landlords, administering rent collection and distribution but it also provides additional value over and above a normal high street agent by providing additional coordination of maintenance, inspections, and support for tenants, and managing relationships between tenants and landlords in the interests of both parties.

In this particular example the Council is not looking for providers who want to build to rent, and is not looking to procure serviced accommodation (it does and will continue to do that through other routes to market).

Having conducted an initial soft market test, published on 23.11.23 (Appendix 1 in Soft Market Test documents), the Council is re-engaging the market to provide further information on the potential opportunity and request additional feedback.