Housing software that works the way you do.

Deep customization without losing your upgrade path

Every housing agency has program rules, local preferences, letters, and processes that no off-the-shelf product ships with. Housing Forge is built by a custom software shop, and we built the platform so that fitting it to your agency never means leaving the core product behind.

Historically, housing software has offered two ways to fit your agency. The first is configuration: explicit settings the vendor chose to expose, such as the questions on an application or how a list pull is assigned, each with a toggle. You can change what the vendor anticipated and nothing else, and anything beyond that waits in a feature-request queue. The second is a custom build: the vendor forks the product, creates a special variant for your agency, and writes your changes into it. You get what you asked for, but your installation now diverges from the core product, and every future upgrade has to be re-applied by hand, if it can be applied at all.

Housing Forge takes a third approach. The core product is architected to allow for custom behavior, including custom code, to be inserted at any point in the platform as configuration. Your rules run inside the same core product every other agency runs, so you get the flexibility and precision of a fully tailored solution while staying on the core standard release branch with every security update and new feature.

This is a key difference between Housing Forge and the incumbent products: they would have to re-engineer their entire platform to offer it.

What this looks like in practice

• Program rules, preferences, age tiers, letters, and application questions configured into your installation, not patched on top
• Custom code delivered as configuration by the engineers who wrote the platform, on a normal delivery schedule
• Every customization carried forward automatically with each platform release
• Integrations with the systems you already run, built to your specification

See what we build on top of the applications module

Native multi-program support

Most housing software treats each program as a silo. An applicant who applies to both public housing and a voucher program is screened twice, on two review worksheets, with the same documents collected and the same facts verified by two staff members. Housing Forge runs state and federal programs, public housing and vouchers, in one unified system with one database, so the work carries across programs while program-specific rules stay separate.

Shared determinations, separate rules. Determinations that don’t depend on the program, such as residence status, homelessness status, and veteran status, are made once and shared between the public housing and voucher programs a household has applied to. Eligibility and qualification determinations that depend on each program’s rules stay program-specific and are reviewed separately, so sharing work never means blurring the rules.

One application, every waitlist. Applicants apply once and can be placed on every list they qualify for. An acceptance or refusal at one agency reconciles automatically across every other list the applicant is on. New programs are added natively to the platform as core functionality: Massachusetts’ state rental voucher programs were added years after launch, with public housing workflows running uninterrupted throughout.

• State-aided public housing, state rental vouchers (mobile and project-based), alternative housing vouchers, and federal Housing Choice Vouchers in one system
• Residence, homelessness, and veteran determinations shared between public housing and voucher programs
• Program-specific eligibility and qualification determinations kept separate, each with its own review
• Auditable priority and preference rules configured per waitlist, state and federal
• Submission-ready HUD-50058 records for federal programs alongside your state programs

See applications and waitlists See screening, income, and rent

Application screening that applicants complete themselves

Field testing with applicants and staff shows that responding to screening is one of the longest steps in the process: applicants don’t know which documents prove what, apply to programs they don’t qualify for or don’t want, and come back with partial responses that staff have to chase. Housing Forge moves that work upstream, so staff rework on fixing applications drops and screening gets done faster.

The right waitlists in the first place. Filtering questions up front steer applicants away from programs they won’t qualify for or won’t want, and a map-based Housing Finder lets them shop waitlists by town, program, bedrooms, and distance, with regulatory application caps enforced automatically. Fewer applications to the wrong lists means less screening for your staff.

More complete screening responses, submitted by the applicant. Each applicant sees a personalized checklist of exactly which documents verify their claims, with pre-filled verification forms in their language, and is guided step by step so that more applicants reach a full screening response on their own. Response tracking at scale, with one-click bulk did-not-respond processing, handles the rest.

AI where it helps. AI document reading against your program’s actual eligibility rules proposes grant, deny, or needs-review and cites the specific document behind each answer, for staff to confirm. Scanned paper applications are transcribed into structured fields for staff review, and a multilingual applicant assistant answers questions from guidance you approved.

• Up-front filtering questions and a map-based Housing Finder, so applicants land on the right waitlists
• Personalized document checklists and guided self-service screening responses
• Per-program eligibility worksheets with granted, denied, and needs-review states, and automatic re-review when an answer changes
• Bulk did-not-respond processing and a background-check workflow with applicant guidance
• AI-assisted screening determinations with cited sources, confirmed by staff

See screening, income, and rent

Waitlist automation that goes beyond mail merge

Managing waitlists shouldn’t mean juggling spreadsheets, manual reviews, and disconnected systems. Housing Forge ranks every applicant against your rules, priorities, and preferences, taking determinations into account, and then runs the workflow around the list: letters, non-responses, rejections, offers, and the audit record behind all of it.

Letters with logic, not just mail merge. Letter generation includes configurable conditional logic, so the right letter goes out with the right content for each applicant’s situation, in their language. Workflows handle non-responsive applicants automatically, generate rejection letters for applicants who don’t qualify, and enforce mandated mailing-wait periods.

Compliance enforced as rules. The compliance rules for which applicant gets an offer, and when you are allowed to make it, are baked into the offer workflow, so an applicant can’t be skipped by accident and an offer can’t go out before it’s allowed. Offers draw from an ordered group of fully verified applicants, fill multiple vacancies from a single pull, and sequence automatically, and every offer and acceptance re-validates eligibility at the moment it happens.

Snapshots for audits. Preview a pull before committing to it. Then, at pull, offer, and archive, the platform takes an immutable snapshot of the list, exportable to Excel, so you can reconstruct any applicant’s position when they appeal.

Highlights

• Intelligent waitlist ranking that takes determinations into account
• Real-time filtering and sorting, with dry-run pulls
• Automated letter generation with conditional logic
• Automated handling of non-responsive applicants, and rejection letters for applicants who don’t qualify
• Multiple vacancies from a single waitlist pull, with built-in offer sequencing
• Compliance rules enforced in the offer workflow
• Immutable snapshots at pull, offer, and archive
• Voucher issuance workflows

See applications and waitlists See the waitlist pull preview

Self-service reporting on all of your data

You own all of your data, you can access all of it, and you can report on all of it. Nothing in Housing Forge is locked away from you: every field the system tracks is available to a self-service reporting tool, to canned reports, and to versioned exports into your own data warehouse. Pull any report you need without waiting on support.

Computed values, not just stored ones. Reporting exposes the values the platform computes but legacy reporting never shows you: how many bedrooms a household qualifies for given its composition, whether a household contains an elderly member, how much of screening has been completed on an application, and the other derived facts the system uses to make its decisions.

• Self-service reporting tool over every tracked field
• Canned reports generated on daily-to-quarterly cadences
• Computed values available in reports: bedroom eligibility by household composition, elderly-household flags, screening completeness
• Versioned, schema-governed exports of your full dataset to your own warehouse, plus a scoped read API
• Real-time dashboards for oversight

See oversight, reporting, and audit See integrations and data export

Multi-agency support, proven statewide in Massachusetts

Housing Forge powers the Common Housing Application for Massachusetts Programs (CHAMP), the portal through which people apply for state public housing assistance in Massachusetts and through which local housing authorities across the Commonwealth screen applicants and offer housing. It replaced a decentralized system in which applicants applied separately, on paper, to every town where they might live, and each authority kept its own records in paper files, Access databases, and assorted off-the-shelf products.

Any combination of management agreements. Agencies don’t all run the same way: some administer their own programs, some manage programs on behalf of neighboring authorities, and regional agencies screen and issue for many. Housing Forge’s organization model supports any combination of these management agreements from one installation, with per-agency configuration underneath.

A configurable degree of data sharing and siloing. How much data organizations share is configurable: shared where a management agreement calls for it, siloed where it doesn’t, with field-level control over who may review what.

A central organization with oversight. The state office sits above the local tier with a real-time dashboard across every agency, access to the data of the organizations it manages, a built-in audit program, statewide waitlist controls, and scheduled reporting. CHAMP won the Manuel Carballo Governor’s Award for Excellence in Public Service for creativity and innovation.

• Self-administering, managed, and managing agencies in one installation
• Configurable data sharing between organizations, from fully shared to fully siloed
• A central oversight dashboard with access to managed organizations’ data
• Centralized screening: one team screening on behalf of many agencies

See oversight, reporting, and audit Who it’s for: state housing agencies

White-glove onboarding, migration, and support, staffed by engineers

Support staffed by engineers. Most software vendors hand you a template to fill in and a tiered help desk: a first-line agent working from a script, an escalation ladder, and a ticket that waits behind thousands of other agencies. Housing Forge support is staffed by the engineers, QA analysts, and designers who built the platform. The person who answers can read the code, reproduce your problem, and deploy the fix, and the same team handles your custom needs and your migration.

Data migration without data loss. We bring extensive experience migrating from legacy housing systems, whether that’s paper ledgers, Microsoft Access, SharePoint, or an incumbent product. Rather than basic template uploads, our engineers write custom extraction scripts, analyze the edge cases in your legacy data, and run a four-stage migration: define the requirements and catalog your data sources; extract and transform the data with custom conversion tools; test the migration in an isolated pre-production environment with reconciled totals; then execute the final cutover with legacy changes frozen, so nothing is lost and no applicant’s place in line changes.

Onboarding and training. Role-specific training for your staff, in person and online, and staged rollouts, program by program or agency by agency, so your team is working in the system before applicants are and the kinks are worked out before go-live.

Support beyond go-live. Engineer-staffed support continues for as long as you run the platform, alongside regular releases of upgrades and new features, regulatory features shipped ahead of time and turned on when you are ready, and 99.99% platform uptime.

• A four-stage migration plan: define, extract and transform, test, cut over
• Historical tenant, landlord payment, vendor payment, and HUD-50058 records migrated with their audit trails preserved
• Applicants deduplicated with original submission dates preserved
• On-site and online role-specific training, with staged rollouts
• Support staffed by the engineers who built the platform, not a tiered help desk

Talk to us about your migration