Your own home
You’ll find and keep the right home
Finding the right home for you
At Discovery, we help you find the perfect home and housemates, exploring a wide range of letting options—including our own supported living homes.
We employ housing market specialists to give you the best chance of finding the right property. These experts work alongside our operational teams to search, mediate, and advise on letting, purchasing, developing, and accessing both private housing and social affordable housing.
Our goal is to make supported living as personalised and stress-free as possible, ensuring you have a home that meets your needs and helps you live the life you choose.
Realistic Housing Solutions Tailored to Your Needs
At Discovery, we work hard to understand your local housing market and help you set realistic expectations.
Involving our housing specialists early ensures clear communication and better outcomes for everyone.
We create a detailed specification outlining what’s essential and what’s desirable. Our specialists listen to your preferences while helping you focus on your needs.
For example, if you require sleep-in support, a two-bedroom property is usually the maximum allowed—unless you need an extra room for sensory needs or medical equipment.
Getting Tenancy-Ready for Supported Living
To make the most of our housing specialists, our support teams will help you become tenancy-ready. This means you must:
Be over 18
Be able to access welfare payments
Have capacity, a court-appointed guardian, or similar (a best interests agreement isn’t enough)
Apply to join the housing register or make a homelessness approach
Know where your funding is coming from
Funding and Exempt Rent
We’ll help you check if you can claim exempt rent (above local housing allowance). Getting this right is crucial—Housing Benefit or commissioners may reject rent that’s above the local average or for a property larger than you need.
In exceptional cases, Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) may pay a top-up if exempt rent is refused. Our experienced team will advise on your chances and ensure you get this in writing, as decisions can take time.
Avoid Hidden Costs
Be cautious of freelance housing brokers who may charge finder’s fees—even if the property turns out to be unsuitable. Our team provides expert, transparent advice to protect you from unnecessary costs.
Additional Costs of Private Rental – What to Expect
If you’re considering renting privately, be aware of the extra costs most agencies require, including:
One month’s rent in advance
Six weeks’ rent as a deposit
Administration, arrangement, and inventory fees
Rent for empty periods (if there’s a delay before you move in)
Rent top-ups if Housing Benefit doesn’t cover the full cost
These costs cannot be added to the rent, as Housing Benefit will not pay for them.
Housing Benefit Rules
You can claim Housing Benefit from the tenancy start date, but if you delay moving in, it won’t cover the rent—unless you’re leaving hospital or residential care. In that case, you may claim up to four weeks’ rent.
If you want to secure a property quickly, consider who will pay the rent while it’s unoccupied.
‘Kevin’ is a young man with a diagnosis of autism, severe learning disability and bipolar disorder.
He’d been in hospital as a long term delayed discharge due to a lack of suitable housing.
When designing the service for Kevin alongside the CCG and other healthcare professionals, we agreed on a very prescriptive specification.
Requirements included three bedrooms in a specific and quiet location, proximity to shops, a lockable kitchen, fixed furniture, recessed lighting, minimal door thresholds, a staff bedroom and so on.
Previous approaches had been made to access the housing register.
Initially we had no success working through the LAs housing team, ‘My Safer Home’ or private landlords. We incurred ‘finder’s fee’ costs from external brokers. The exempt rent application went to appeal and the CCG wouldn’t pay the difference between local housing allowance and the market rate. It was a tough, but not uncommon, situation.
A best interests meeting let us look at a wider range of homes and together we found a preference.
We applied for housing benefits for an Exempt Rent and the CCG agreed to pay for property adaptations and rent top-up if the Exempt Rent application failed.
This meant we could sign a let, reducing the chance of losing the property.
Due to the adaptations, we agreed an unusual three-year lease and matched that with Kevin’s tenancy agreement.
Following the adaptations, all informed by our behaviour support team, Kevin successfully moved out of hospital and into his new home.
