Peer cohorts

1. Default cohort

For any landlord you view, ScoreView builds a default peer cohort from three attributes:

• Landlord type:housing association, local authority, ALMO or TMO.
• Stock size band:small (under 1,000 homes), medium (1,000 to 10,000), large (over 10,000).
• Region:RSH geographic region.

All three must match. This produces a cohort of landlords that operate at a comparable scale, in a comparable place, under comparable rules.

2. Auto-widening

A useful comparison needs at least five peers. When the default cohort returns fewer than five, ScoreView widens it in two steps:

1. Drop the region constraint, keep type and size.
2. If still under five, drop the size band, keep type only.

Every chart or stat using a widened cohort declares the widening explicitly. You will see copy such as “Regional cohort had only 3 peers; widened to national for a sufficient comparison.”The cohort badge on the chart shifts to Widened to nationalor Widened to all sizes so the change is never invisible.

3. Custom cohorts

On the Professional tier you can define your own peer cohort of up to ten named landlords. Custom peers are saved to your Watchlist with a peer-cohort flag, so the same set governs benchmarking wherever cohort comparison appears.

Custom cohorts only override the default when at least three custom peers are chosen. Below three the default cohort still applies. Three peers is the minimum at which a comparison is informative rather than anecdotal.

4. Watch Level fallback

Some landlords do not meet the eligibility threshold for the composite complaint risk score (fewer than ten closed determinations). For those landlords ScoreView falls back to the Watch Level cohort: peers grouped by the same RSH consumer and governance grade rather than by complaint volume.

The Watch Level cohort still produces a meaningful peer signal for sparse-data landlords, and the cohort badge will read Watch Level fallback so the basis of comparison is clear.

5. Reading the cohort badge

Every chart, table and stat keyed to a peer cohort carries a cohort badge. The badge shows three things:

• Mode:Default, Custom, Widened to national, Widened to all sizes, or Watch Level fallback.
• Label:the human-readable cohort description, for example Large housing associations in London.
• n:the count of peers in the active cohort.

Where the badge reads Default you are looking at the strictest possible comparison. Where it reads anything else, ScoreView has relaxed the cohort to produce a usable comparison, and the narrative beneath the chart explains what changed.