Dates: 22 October, 2026

Location: London, England

Affordable Housing Commons Workshop: Thank you for building with us!

“It is so exciting to share ideas and innovate and build together. Such a community feel!” - Workshop attendee

What a day! The UK Housing Community is one of the most active and welcoming groups we get to work with, and it showed. Housing Associations, partners, and Salesforce colleagues spent the day together building free, open source tools for affordable housing. Think of it like a hackathon, but instead of competing, everyone works together on shared projects.

We held the workshop in the London AI Centre the day before Housing Day (Friday, 23 October), so our housing friends could roll up their sleeves together first and head into the next day already connected. It also builds on the Affordable Housing Accelerator (AHA), the community effort that started at our London Sprint in June, where housing associations shared tools like Easy Repair Locator and Easy Milestones for everyone to use.

Attendees at the Affordable Housing Commons Workshop in London

Housing Workshop Group photo! October, 2026

Back in 2024, we announced the Commons Affordable Housing Program, in which the Commons + Nonprofit Community Team and the UK Housing Team at Salesforce partnered to address the longstanding need for collaboration on technology solutions among UK social housing associations. This event was a continuation of that work and that partnership!

To everyone who joined: thank you for giving us your day, your skills, and your energy. 🙌

What Was Built: Project Highlights

Check out the 5 community-led projects from the day:

In alphabetical order

  1. AI Prompts for Housing Use Cases
  2. Complaints AI
  3. Documentation
  4. External Agent
  5. Housing Health and Safety Rating System (HHSRS) Forms

1. AI Prompts for Housing Use Cases

A project exploring how AI prompts can save housing teams time on everyday casework.

Work performed at this workshop:

  • Built a flow using Prompt Builder that pulls together the notes, emails, letters, and meeting transcripts on a complaint case into one clear summary
  • Turned that summary into a readable email that can be sent to the tenant

Next Steps:

  • Trial the flow in a working test environment and refine the prompt through testing
  • Explore generating follow-up tasks and actions from the summary

Team members: Alex Jessop, Abigail Green, Kenny Kristiansen, Oliver Prichard

2. Complaints AI

A project using AI to help housing teams sort complaints by how serious and how complex they are.

Work performed at this workshop:

  • Built an AI prompt to categorise a complaint by severity and complexity
  • Created new case fields, an Apex class, an LWC and the prompt itself with the help of Agentforce Vibes
  • Used MS Copilot to help draft the prompt, so this one was very AI assisted

Next Steps:

  • Sort out the deployment issues and make sure everything works end to end

Team members: Jonathan Pilkington, Fiona Passey, Graham Weaver

3. Documentation

A project making it easier for the next contributors to share their work.

Work performed at this workshop:

  • Completed a documentation template that guides developers through documenting their contributions on GitHub, with helper text and links to relevant external information, including legislation

Next Steps:

  • Share the template so future teams can use it and keep improving it

Team members: Nathaniel Sombu, Beth Noel, Srividya G, Youssef Jebbah, Ilhan Cabuk, Stephen Sermon

4. External Agent

A brand new idea from the room: a tenant-facing agent that gives simple answers around the clock and frees up human advisors for the conversations that need them.

Work performed at this workshop:

  • Built a basic agent that uses tenant data to answer everyday questions, like when and how to pay rent or how to get a copy of a tenancy agreement
  • Added the ability to summarise a conversation and raise a case when a person needs to step in
  • Talked through the risks of external-facing agents, including data quality, only answering when confident, using the right tone of voice for each organisation, and signposting to things like third-party payment providers

Next Steps:

  • Upload the agent to GitHub for sharing and future improvements

Team members: Connie McCrudden, Bharat Sharma, Harry Ryding, Mark Bissmire

5. Housing Health and Safety Rating System (HHSRS) Forms

A new project to help housing teams record and report on property hazards inside their existing case management setup. Follow along in the project Slack channel, osc-housing-forms.

Work performed at this workshop:

  • Built a foundational structure for the HHSRS, using the 21 hazards in the regulation and its low to high risk framework
  • Created an Identified Hazard record that links to a case and to the property’s overall hazard status, so teams can see the risk level of a property at a glance
  • Mapped out a real-world example: a resident reports a gas smell, the team logs a case, categorises the hazard, and the property’s risk picture updates

Next Steps:

  • Automate bulk updates to residents when a hazard affects a shared building
  • Explore automated recommendations, suggested risk levels, and inspection or repair timelines

Team members: Alice Harford, Daniel Cook, Jacob Smycz, Sam Fenn, David Cooke

What’s Next

Want to keep building with us? Join us at the San Francisco Community Sprint on November 9-10, 2026.

Follow the Salesforce Nonprofit Commmunity page on LinkedIn to stay in the loop on future events in the area!