Forge a more intelligent waitlist workflow.
Transform your agency's workflows with a modern, managed platform centered around your housing needs - with proven workflows for applications, waitlists, compliance, screening, and leasing. Built on the technology that powers CHAMP for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
We understand what your day-to-day actually looks like. Housing Forge covers the full applicant lifecycle: applicant intake, waitlists, eligibility screening, offers, lease-up, voucher administration, and tenant operations. Workflow features and AI integrations cut manual tasks so that your staff can focus where it matters.
Every deployment runs the same core engine that powers housing workflows, business logic, and functionality. Your chapters, preferences, letters, program rules, etc are configured seamlessly into your installation with no patchwork of add-ons. Our expert software engineers work behind the scenes to ensure the platform stays up to date on security, and we anticipate your needs, shipping regulatory features that can be turned on when you are ready to go.
Support for Housing Forge is staffed by engineers, not a help desk: the person who answers can read the code, find the problem, and deploy the fix. The same team brings you from the past to the future. Let us handle the data cleanup, whether that's paper ledgers, Microsoft Access, or a legacy system, and preserve every applicant's place in line. Let us handle program fit, configuring and extending the platform to match your agency's programs, rules, and processes. Let us handle onboarding, so your team is trained and the kinks are worked out before going live.
No off-the-shelf product ships with all of your statutes, policies, and established business workflows. That's why we've designed Housing Forge to be a cohesive, unified system with both powerful out-of-the-box capabilities and expansive customization possibilities.
Applicants submit a single application online, on their mobile phone, or on paper to get on the waitlists they qualify for. Programs, housing types, chapters, preferences, and age tiers are declarative configuration on top of a single central codebase that runs state public housing, state rental vouchers, alternative housing vouchers, and federal Housing Choice Vouchers side by side. One codebase, one database, every program you administer.
Housing Forge ranks every applicant against your waitlist rules, priorities, and preferences. Preview exactly who a list pull would select before you commit to it.
Detailed snapshots of every list are taken at key points in the process. Export your snapshots to Excel and have all the waitlist data in front of you when an applicant appeals.
Reconstruct any applicant's waitlist position as needed.
■ Snapshot lockedAugust 28, 2026, 2:02 PM ESTExport to Excel
| Capability | Housing Forge | Yardi | Emphasys |
|---|---|---|---|
| One application across every program you run | Yes | Limited: one profile, then apply per waitlist | Limited: one application per agency’s open lists |
| Screening work shared across programs, with program-specific rules kept separate | Yes | Limited: shared application data; screening reuse not documented | Not documented |
| Dry-run list pulls: preview who a pull selects before committing | Yes | Not documented | Not documented |
| Immutable audit snapshots at pull, offer, and archive | Yes | Limited: waitlist history and archiving, no snapshots | Not documented |
| Customizations that don’t break your upgrade path | Yes | Limited: case-by-case paid custom programming by change request | Limited: agency-specific custom builds; upgrades often break customizations or remove features |
| Full data export and API included, no per-unit license | Yes | No: per-unit licensing and per-interface API fees | Limited: APIs sold as add-ons; pricing not public |
Leverage Housing Forge's powerful AI features to handle routine data tasks and free up your staff's time for more important decisions. Our AI features are safe, accountable, and people-centered: our AI tools do not train on your data.
Save data entry time with an AI tool that generates transcriptions of your scanned paper applications into easy-to-review online forms
Support your screening determinations with AI document evaluation and analysis against program eligibility rules
Tag every income source, asset, and expense against the federal annual income definition
Automatically create click-to-approve draft work orders from unit inspection checklists and deficiency photos
Consult a built-in policy assistant for plain English explanations of your actual ACOP and administrative plan
Provide your applicants with an accessible AI chat assistant that answers questions in their languages, backed by content you approve
Single sign-on against your identity provider, multi-factor authentication on every staff login, 13 roles composed from about 95 discrete permissions with delegated administration, encryption at rest and in transit, annual user-access reviews with automatic lockout on lapse, and an audit trail covering roughly 112 event types.
Versioned, schema-governed, checksummed exports of your full dataset to your own warehouse, with full access for reporting and analytics. A scoped read API for your partner agencies and vendors. Server-to-server CRM integration. No per-unit license fee.
The core platform currently supports state public housing, state rental vouchers (mobile and project-based), alternative housing vouchers, and federal Housing Choice Vouchers. New program types can be configured or extended to fit your exact requirements, including workflow modifications or net new functionality.
We build it. The engineers who wrote the platform build the expansion into your installation on a normal delivery schedule, so your requirement becomes part of your platform rather than a feature request behind thousands of other agencies.
Engineers. Housing Forge support is staffed by the engineers, QA analysts, and designers who built the platform and work on it every day. There is no escalation ladder: the person who takes your request can read the code, reproduce the problem, and deploy the fix.
Yes. Complex programs are where the platform was proven: CHAMP runs layered preferences, multiple program types, and a state oversight tier across 240+ agencies. Anything the core doesn’t cover out of the box, our engineers extend, configuring and building on the platform to match your rules, workflows, and integrations exactly, delivered into your installation on a normal schedule and maintained with every platform update.
Yes, and this is where legacy products fall behind. When federal funding shifts, agencies restructure to stay solvent: public housing converts to Section 8 to make better use of available funding, developments move into LLC ownership structures, and program rules keep getting more complex. Systems built around a fixed program model can’t follow those changes. Housing Forge treats programs, ownership entities, and rules as configuration, and our engineers extend the platform as your rules and structure change, so your system keeps pace with your agency instead of holding it back.
It powers CHAMP, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’ statewide housing program, and has since 2019: 240+ agencies, 700,000+ applications, 2,000+ staff users, and a state oversight tier above all of it. It has been through multiple independent security audits and an accessibility audit, and it won a Governor’s Award for Excellence in Public Service. We will connect you with references.
Staged rollout is how this was done at statewide scale. Local agencies in Massachusetts were trained and working in the system months before the applicant portal went public, which meant bugs and usability issues surfaced with a friendly audience first.
Yes. Printed applications are generated from the same templates as the online forms in seven languages, so the two remain in parity. Staff enter paper applications inside tracked data-entry sessions that preserve the paper form’s original date, and AI-assisted transcription pre-fills about 90 fields.
Housing Forge calculates income, deductions, and rent under current HUD rules, and generates submission-ready form HUD-50058 records directly from your tenant data.
Yes. Full versioned exports of your entire dataset to your own warehouse are a standard feature, included in every deployment.
It is designed for accessibility and has been through an accessibility audit: screen-reader tagged PDFs, ARIA-wired form validation, skip links, and visually-hidden equivalents wherever status is shown in color.
Housing Forge integrates with the finance system you are not replacing.
No.
An intro conversation, a demo of Housing Forge, a conversation about your specific needs.
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