Making Rural Development Easy With Fortress OS

With a mission like “empower everyone, everywhere, to rent better”, you can imagine how excited we are to share that we're expanding our affordable product to cover Section 515 housing. 

And no, that doesn't mean a few extra features to tick a box and say we've made a tailored solution. It means an 'affordable-first' development approach that addresses the challenges of the area from the ground up, not as an afterthought.

We're genuinely passionate about removing barriers for property managers and tenants by providing a streamlined solution to the specific challenges of rural property management. Here's how our best-in-class PMOS software is about to change the rural development game and make the headaches associated with Section 515 a distant memory.

A complex problem

RD Section 515 properties include family, disabled, elderly, and congregate housing. It's a hugely important program that offers a glimmer of hope in neighborhoods challenged by unemployment and difficulty in accessing decent, safe, and affordable homes.

We'll be the first to shout about the benefits of the program but there's no hiding the fact that it comes with some significant challenges for developers managing a rural development portfolio.

There are the travel costs of visiting multiple sites dispersed across large areas, the challenges of maintenance schedules, and the difficulty of coordinating contractors with limited on-site presence. Not to mention the difficulty of trying to maintain financial viability in areas with high turnover and vacancy rates. Everything needs to run smoothly to keep properties occupied, tenants happy, and housing fit for purpose.

That's before we even get on to the compliance side. Ah, compliance…annual verifications, certifications, recertifications, fair housing compliance, income verification of hundreds of people (some with irregular income sources), the list goes on.

It can quickly pile up and become an admin nightmare. Compound that with the fact you need to constantly communicate with residents, keep staff trained, and stay up-to-date with changes to regulations in real-time. It can end up a whole mess!

 

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A simple solution

To overcome these issues, you need user-friendly tech that makes things easy. You need an affordable solution that centralizes the whole management workflow, saves time, and doesn't take two years to learn or integrate.

So we built it.

The brand-new features of our affordable product empower you to take control of the full process, cut out the inefficiency, and simply focus on running a successful business.

Having everything in one place means clean data. A single source of truth that everything flows through, enabling you to calculate income and manage layered properties efficiently. Everything from maintenance and compliance to staff training and comms is there at the click of a button.

Fortress lets you have a proactive maintenance schedule, easily coordinating contractors and inspections remotely. It also means that the admin headaches of certification and tenant eligibility are a distant memory.

With a dedicated compliance hub, you have prebuilt forms to easily generate documents like inspection records and RD certifications ready for print and sign. Every step is simple, with clear indicators that all the necessary information is right. 

What's more, you’ll find inbuilt functionality to give you plenty of notice when it's time for recertification, as well as real-time updates of any regulation changes, keeping you ahead of the game and up to date, always.

As well as making compliance easy, we’re making people management simple too. Leverage in-system training and communicate with staff and tenants all from within the software.

Having everything in one place also means smooth transitions between regular tenants and affordable program users, ensuring a great experience for both sides.

We're not stopping there though.

Did you know a huge portion of Section 515 applications are abandoned due to the complexity?

We’re soon launching a completely paperless application for tenants. We want to make it easy for both applicants and management to coordinate everything, with no back-and-forth or time-consuming in-person meetings. 

This phased process will have functionality for multiple languages and can be completed end-to-end in the palm of your tenants' hands. 

For more information on our affordable product, watch our software tour!