Affordable Housing Software for Residents and Managers

Running an affordable housing community can be a unique challenge for all levels of management. Families in these units are often under personal and financial stress, and the right tools make offering the flexibility and support they need easier. 

Property management software for landlords can be your greatest ally, allowing you to accurately track payments, communicate with ease, process maintenance requests, and provide of-the-moment transparency for all levels of management.  

Most systems in place today are bulky, overly complicated, and difficult for both property managers and their residents to use. True affordable housing software solutions should make managing your property seamless. With features like tracking and storing subsidy payments, application, and administrative fees, integrating with TRACS, online applications, and robust reporting your team is empowered to be efficient without the stress. 

Payment Tracking Tools

Payments can be a unique challenge for families under stress. They may need to use different payment methods from month to month and/or need more time to stop by the office during regular business hours. As a result, property managers in affordable housing situations need to be flexible. 

Unfortunately, most property management software platforms don’t make this easy. In many cases, payment information, history, and notes all show up on separate screens, and they are often not conveniently organized. Furthermore, many systems only update at the end of the day or the weekend, so current data may not be reflected in reports generated by different layers of management. 

What to Look For?

The best affordable housing software solutions offer residents intuitive online portals that provide multiple payment options. They should: 

• Make communications with property managers seamless for residents if any issues arise.
• Update payments instantly across the system so all layers of management have access to clear and current data to deliver to leadership, and residents can rest assured that their payment was received. 
• Send late notices to residents.

Responsive Maintenance Requests

The right software tools can help you receive, process, and close maintenance requests. Without an easy and clear way to file maintenance requests, necessary repairs can drag on for weeks or even months. 

What to Look For

Property management software should be designed to bring residents, property managers, and maintenance providers together, not complicate their lives. Property management portals should:

• Record the actual hardware and appliances in every unit.
• Offer detailed checkboxes for common issues that point to actionable solutions to avoid scheduling multiple costly service appointments to fix simple problems. 
• Allow managers to coordinate with vendors in their area and track payments, requests, and status updates in real-time to ensure the job is being done. 

Easy Moving

Life is full of ups and downs, and residents come and go. While affordable housing is geared toward sustainable long-term living, these moments are a chance for another family to take advantage of an affordable opportunity. 

What to Look For

A well-designed property management system for affordable housing should:

• Offer online applications
• Provide tenant income certifications 
• Track and store subsidy payments
• Make move-ins and move-outs easy to coordinate.
• Quickly update waiting lists.
• Integrate with major online rental sites like apartments.com to make it easy to generate and contact potential leads so no unit ever sits empty.   

Clear Communication Options

People who work late or have children in school may not have a lot of time to spend struggling with communication, so it needs to be fast and simple to understand. Also, systems that are not intuitive can be harder for some residents to navigate—particularly older people who may not be as tech-savvy as younger renters. 

What to Look For

Online portal profiles should:

• Be easy to use and set up—ideally generating automatically from normal move-in processes. 
• Allow residents to send messages to management and neighbors and post alerts for everyone to see. 
• Facilitate property managers reminding residents about an upcoming office closure due to a federal holiday or follow up with an individual about a maintenance request.

Application Management

A quality software tool can streamline the application process, both for you and your prospective residents. 

What to Look For

The right property management software for landlords should:  

• Simultaneously make your application process paperless and more secure.
• Collect application fees, deposit fees, and administrative fees (if any).
• Help future tenants fill out applications faster and complete all of the necessary paperwork to move in.
• Flag missing or inconsistent information for correction. 
• Hide private information like social security numbers and dates of birth.
• Track payments in a ledger. 

ExactEstate is the Best Affordable Housing Software 

ExactEstate offers all the features mentioned here and then some, and it’s quite simply one of the best affordable housing software solutions on the market today. It allows you to manage both your tenants and your facilities and empowers all levels of management with the information they need to quickly resolve problems and generate reports. 

Our team also believes in setting fair prices for the software that we offer. This allows you to improve your workflows without increasing your operating costs. With ExactEstate, you can make your affordable housing community even more affordable. 

Schedule a demo today and see how ExactEstate can meet your affordable housing software needs.