Waiting List Length
We do not have a waiting list system – These Homes is a choice-based digital letting service. Anyone can register with These Homes and apply for priority if they have a priority need to be rehoused.
We have over 3,500 live registrations. Each year we only have around 80 available properties, and of these 50% are offered to applicants who have been assessed as homeless by East Lothian Council under homeless legislation. At any one time, around 300 households on These Homes have homeless priority, which means that we only have 30-40 available properties each year for the remaining households.
In other words, we typically house less than 2% of our non-homeless applicants each year, and if we did not take any new applications to new non-homeless applicants today, it would still take over 50 years to house everyone. Of the 67 households we housed in 2025-26, the average time they had been registered with our previous allocation system was a little over a year and a half, and all but one of them had a Priority Pass or had special circumstances (e.g. a nomination from an external agency, or a need for a specialised property). The one allocation where the applicant did not have a priority pass was for a one bedroom Amenity (over 50s) flat in Gullane, where the applicant had been registered with us for over nine and half years.
