Case Study of Microstone – Scotland

Abstract: Microstone is an award-winning letting agency operating as a social enterprise (hereafter SE). Their social aim is to create secure, quality homes for tenants facing vulnerable circumstances while enabling landlords to successfully manage their investments. It is an ethical business group comprising the SE letting agency, Microstone Investment, Microstone Investment City and Microstone Property Care. In its infancy, Microstone benefited from the crowded national landscape of SE support in Scotland. It managed to gather support and funding from the available start-up agencies, relying on the founder's knowledge of the national ecosystem as well as on the fundamentally innovative idea of setting up a letting agency to cater the needs of the most vulnerable within the housing market. In this stems Microstone uniqueness within the Scottish landscape. Microstone is now an established, multi award winning SE. It has won two national awards in this regard. It combines social investment (e.g. capital investments) and trading. Microstone is also embedded in the local SE landscape of collaborative networks with the social enterprise support framework and all its various agencies like the city Social Enterprise Network, Communities Enterprises Information Scotland (CEiS), and local authorities in the areas where they hold their housing stock (e.g. city and neighbouring local authorities).