The New Wave: Affordable Housing Developers, Managers Leverage Technology to Improve Their Product, Residents’ Lives
By Caitlin Jones
2 min read
Tax Credit Advisor — July 2012 — At Sage Partners LLC, a Florida developer, different types of technology are enabling the company to better market and manage its three completed affordable housing developments and improve the quality of life for residents. “Anything that has less than a seven-year payback we will look at,” says Debra Koehler, co-founder and president of the Tampa-based firm. Its completed projects, all low-income housing tax credit developments, are Metro 510 (new construction, 120 units) and Vista 400 (acquisition/rehab, 200 units) in Tampa, and The Viridian (acquisition/rehab, 188 units) in St. Petersburg. At Metro 510, Sage Partners has just implemented a service from Verizon called Concierge, which enables two-way electronic communications between site managers and residents using PCs or mobile devices. For example, residents can text or email management their service requests, and quickly get a response telling them when a service tech will come to their unit. By the same token, managers can communicate to residents about community activities or other actions, such as work about to be done in a particular hallway. “It saves a lot of money and time, where we used to have to post notices on their doors and things like that,” says Koehler. “The average age in that community is 29. So they’ve really embraced the technology as far as communications.”
