Before joining M3, Sundeep Heer worked in senior housing development roles, using M3Pamwin as a client, not a consultant. Here she reflects on what the platform genuinely changed about her work, and what anyone considering it should know going in.
Before joining M3, I spent 10 years working in development at housing associations. I created appraisals, presented schemes to boards, negotiated S106 agreements, and tried to explain to development directors why the programme numbers did not quite add up the way they did the previous month.
I used M3Pamwin during that time, first as someone who needed to get up to speed quickly, and later as someone who knew the platform well enough to understand both what it did well and where it fell short. That experience is largely why I am now on the other side, working as a consultant.
Having seen the platform from within a housing association development team, this is not intended as a product endorsement, but rather an honest account of what it is actually like to use in practice.
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Faster than I expected
I expected M3Pamwin to require significant setup time before it became genuinely useful. Most appraisal software has that period where you are configuring the system before it starts working for you.
What I found instead, was that the standard appraisal models were ready to use from day one. The tenure assumptions were pre-populated with defaults that reflected how affordable housing development actually works. This wasn’t just a lot of generic placeholders that needed a complete overhaul, but a model that understood shared ownership, London Affordable Rent and social rent because it had been built by people who had appraised those tenures in real organisations.
This mattered, because the market doesn’t wait for software implementation, and the real test of any appraisal tool is not how it performs in the demo, but how it performs when you have four hours to put together a credible site offer, and the vendor needs the numbers as soon as possible.
Multi-tenures handled properly
I worked on schemes carrying private sale, shared ownership, social rent, London Affordable Rent and a commercial element, all on the same site, each with different cost profiles, valuations, grant treatment and S106 obligations. Managing that in a spreadsheet required a level of discipline that was, frankly, exhausting.
In M3Pamwin, that complexity is native to the platform. Each tenure is held separately, valued independently, and the aggregate position is always visible. More significantly, the ability to model sensitivity across scenarios in real time changed how we negotiated viability with local authorities. It meant that we could demonstrate to a planning officer exactly how changes to the affordable percentage affected the scheme viability, in real time, without having to schedule a follow up meeting to present the revised numbers.
Presenting the numbers with confidence
Before M3Pamwin Plus, quarterly programme reporting took the best part of a week. Team members extracted data from individual appraisals, someone aggregated it, someone else quality-checked it, and by the time it reached the board it was already slightly out of date.
The shift to programme-level management changed the nature of those conversations. Instead of presenting a historical snapshot, we were presenting a live view of our schemes at each stage of the process, including cashflow against forecast and outturn viability against the original appraisal. The shift – from cautious to confident that this produced, is difficult to quantify, but easy to recognise by anyone who has sat in those meetings.
Before you start…
Like all complex platforms, it takes time to get the most out of it. For teams who have spent years working in Excel, the switch to a system where the logic is already built in requires a period of adjustment, before it comes naturally.
The training is worth doing properly. Not because the platform is unusable without it, but because it is delivered by people who have worked in development teams and understand the questions you need answering.
From in-house to consultant
I moved from a housing association to consultancy because I had seen what the platform could do when used well, and I wanted to help other teams get there. The conversations I have with prospective clients now, are very similar to the ones I used to have internally – concerns about whether the investment is justified, how the implementation will work, and what the platform cannot do, as well as what it can.
Every consultant at M3 has worked in the sector they now advise. This shapes the quality of the support you get, and it is why, when something is not working the way you need it to, the person on the other end of the call usually understands exactly what you mean. This support continues after implementation, with clients having access to ongoing training, a user group that has genuine input into the product roadmap, and sector-wide benchmarking reports that are only possible because of the breadth of the M3 client base. That means our clients aren’t just buying software, they are joining a network that gets more useful the longer they are a part of it.
Join the M3Pamwin Showcase
M3 will be hosting a free online showcase on Monday 15 June at 10:00am-11:00pm
The showcase is aimed at development and finance professionals curious about whether Pamwin is the right fit for their organisation. Our consultants will share a focused platform overview, followed by an open Q&A, so you can ask the questions that matter to you.
To book your place, please click here
