Oct. 28, 2016 – USDA Rural Development/Rural Housing Service has launched a website providing data that can be searched and manipulated by users interested in preservation of rural rental housing. RHS Administrator Tony Hernandez sent the following email to stakeholders.

Subject: Great news and opportunity with MF Property Preservation Dashboards

Multifamily Partners,

I am happy to announce USDA Rural Housing Service has unveiled a set of five dashboards designed to provide key data to help preserve the affordability of USDA’s Multi-Family Housing (MFH) properties. The publicly accessible, user-friendly set – currently available in beta – is designed to help policymakers and industry leaders collect, track and analyze the timeframe for when the USDA mortgages could be paid off exiting USDA’s MFH program. These dashboards and their information can facilitate preservation discussions such as the transfer of properties and other efforts to protect our tenants.

Using this data will help you and the department take strategic action to preserve MF properties as appropriate, using RHS financing tools, including re-amortization, deferring loan payments, seeking new loans for rehabilitation, transferring properties to new owners, or take other actions to preserve affordable rental housing in rural areas.

The beta Property Preservation Dashboards can be publicly accessed on the Tableau Public Website. They complement data resources released by USDA earlier this year, including its rural housing investment data, program exit data, and mapped data overlaid with thousands of other indicators in PolicyMap. The Dashboard enable users to obtain such critical information as the number of USDA MFH properties exist in each state and details on projected dates for mortgage pay-offs.

When using the dashboards, you can narrow the data by location, program and other indicators. The dashboards also feature a user guide and data dictionary.

I am very excited to see the great work you will be able to do with access to this information. Thank you for working with USDA RHS to preserve multifamily properties and improve lives in rural America!

Tony

Tony Hernandez
Administrator
Rural Housing Service