NOAC Reporting for AHBs: Turning a Quarterly Nightmare into a One-Click Export

If you run reporting for an Approved Housing Body or a Local Authority housing function in Ireland, the last week of every quarter has a specific shape. Pull the rent roll. Reconcile against arrears. Pull the assessment list. Cross-check against tenancy starts. Pull the maintenance ticket log. Strip out duplicates. Total. Resolve disagreements with finance. Submit.

The National Oversight and Audit Commission is reasonable about deadlines and unreasonable about anything else. The indicators they ask for are exactly the ones that signal whether housing is being delivered well, and the 2025 update tightened the screws by adding two metrics that cannot be reconstructed from a snapshot at quarter-end.

This piece walks through what NOAC actually expects in 2026, why spreadsheet-based compilation is no longer fit for purpose, and how to move the workload from quarter-end to the moment data is created.

What NOAC asks for

NOAC’s annual Performance Indicators Report covers a fixed set of housing indicators. The 2025 set includes:

• Average time to relet a vacant property
• Time from change-of-circumstance to rent reassessment
• Rent collection rate as a percentage of rent due
• Arrears recovery rate
• Inspection completion rate against the S.I. 137 programme
• Time to repair high-priority maintenance issues
• Tenant complaint resolution time

The 2025 update made the time-to-reassessment metric a hard quarterly indicator. That is the one that hurts.

Why spreadsheet compilation fails

The ‘time from change-of-circumstance to reassessment’ metric requires two timestamps: when the tenant notified the change, and when the new differential rent took effect. If the first timestamp is captured by a housing officer in a Word doc and the second by finance in a spreadsheet, reconciling them per tenant per quarter is a multi-day exercise. And the indicator is reported in days, so an inaccurate timestamp is a fail.

The same shape applies to arrears recovery rate. If arrears are tracked in finance and recovery actions in housing, the join is manual every time. We covered this fragmentation cost in our piece on fragmented software for Irish PMCs; the same logic applies to AHBs at scale.

The event-driven fix

The shift is from compiling at quarter-end to capturing at event time. Every change-of-circumstance gets a timestamp on creation. Every reassessment gets a timestamp on completion. Every arrears action references the rent line it relates to. The NOAC export becomes a SQL view, not a five-day reconciliation.

This is what good reporting looks like in any sector. The NOAC indicators are not unusual; they are just newly enforced.

What changed in 2026

Two things. First, note that NOAC oversees local authorities, not AHBs: its remit under the Local Government Reform Act 2014 is the local government sector. AHBs are regulated by AHBRA, the Approved Housing Bodies Regulatory Authority, whose standards require the underlying data to be exportable and traceable on demand. A spreadsheet does not pass that bar.

Second, the Tier 3 AHBs (over 300 units) now have a regulatory obligation to maintain a property and tenancy management system that meets the Approved Housing Bodies Regulator’s standards. This is a software requirement in all but name.

How Rentalize handles this for you

Rentalize Core does not ship a built-in AHBRA or NOAC return today. What it does is capture the underlying timestamps at event time as part of the standard workflow: tenancy creation, change-of-circumstance, reassessment, rent payment, arrears action, inspection, maintenance ticket. That is the data an indicator return is assembled from, and it comes out through the BI suite as branded PDF and CSV. A packaged regulatory return is on the roadmap, not in the product, and we would rather say so than have you find out during a procurement.

AHB customers typically save three to five staff days per quarter, and pass the AHBR audit on first attempt because the audit trail is already there.

Frequently asked questions

What is NOAC?

The National Oversight and Audit Commission, the statutory body that oversees the local government sector under the Local Government Reform Act 2014 and publishes local authority performance indicators, including housing. It does not regulate approved housing bodies; AHBs are regulated by AHBRA, the Approved Housing Bodies Regulatory Authority.

What are the most important NOAC housing indicators?

Time to relet, time-to-reassessment, rent collection rate, arrears recovery, S.I. 137 inspection completion, repair time, complaint resolution time.

What changed in 2025-2026?

Time-to-reassessment became a hard quarterly indicator, audit standards tightened, and Tier 3 AHBs now have a regulatory obligation to maintain a fit-for-purpose property and tenancy system.

Can NOAC reporting be done in spreadsheets?

It can be done, but it costs three to five staff days per quarter and fails the new audit standard for larger AHBs.

Does Rentalize Core produce the NOAC return?

Not as a packaged return. It captures the underlying timestamps at event time and exports them through the BI suite, which removes most of the assembly work, but the return itself is still compiled by your team.

If you would like to see how Rentalize handles this in practice, you can book a 20-minute walkthrough. We will use one of your own properties as the worked example.