Connections at YASC

Fort Smith Housing Authority

By Mike Sederholm on Mar 6, 2018 in News, People

The next Yardi Advanced Solutions Conference is coming to Washington, D.C., kicking off on May 30, 2018. YASC brings together more than 1,500 professionals from nearly every property and financial management industry for instruction, comradery, and insight into the future of technology.

At last year’s YASC, we sat down with Rachel Brown, Section 8 manager for the Fort Smith, Arkansas Housing Authority (FSHA). Rachel has witnessed exciting growth during her nearly 15 years with FSHA, growth that includes personal experiences, organizational development, as well as the growth of clients she serves. Here’s a recap of our conversation last spring.

Welcome to YASC! Tell us a little about yourself and your organization.

Our mission is to develop, rehabilitate and manage decent, safe and sanitary affordable housing. We promote equal opportunity, fair housing initiatives and the deconcentration of race and poverty. I’ve been with FSHA for nearly 15 years, and we’ve really grown over that time. When I first started as a housing specialist, we had around 450 Public Housing units and less than 1,200 vouchers. Today, we have more than 1,600 vouchers under our management, transitioned 288 public housing units through the RAD program, and replaced 170 public housing units with the help of Low-Income Housing Tax Credits.  Our current development efforts include Low-Income Housing Tax Credit units, rehabbing dilapidated housing for sale to low- and moderate-income families, and exploring ways to provide everyone with the affordable housing that meets their needs.

What do you find most rewarding about your career thus far?

Seeing people’s lives transition and change for the better, those are the real ‘wow’ moments. Clients come into our program in many personal situations. Some are single parents, others are going to school or raising a family. It’s inspiring when they enter our FSS (Family Self-Sufficiency) program, graduate, and then go on to buy a home or starting their own business. It’s just so rewarding. Seeing their lives evolve and change for the better makes us, in the housing authority, say, ‘this is what our programs are for; this is what we’re here for.’

Tell us about your experience as a long-time Yardi client.

Our support staff at Yardi, I can’t give them enough kudos. They are spot on, all the time. We’ve all had experience with other support providers where you end up putting the phone on speaker and waiting for hours– sometimes forgetting the reason why we called in the first place. It’s not like that with Yardi. Whether it’s on the phone, or by email, or even via live assistance through a remote connection to our computer desktops, Yardi support is very responsive. I love that about Yardi.

How about the Public Housing team?

Yardi helps us keep up with evolving policies, which is wonderful. HUD changes things so often, and when they do, Yardi gets right on it with a plugin or update to make the process easy to accomplish. Portability is a great example. Voyager makes it so much easier to work with vouchers from other areas, which was a job our staff used to dread before we began using Yardi. Now we just fill out a couple of tabs in Voyager, add the HUD Form 52665 and follow up information, and then boom, you’re done.

Want to make new connections with your property management peers? Register now for YASC. Early bird discounts are still in effect but are expiring soon!