In 2009, NYHousingSearch.gov was procured as a housing listing and locator service by the New York State Division of Housing and Community Renewal (“DHCR”), one of the seven agencies that comprise HCR, to connect New Yorkers to affordable, accessible, high quality, and safe rental housing opportunities that meet the need of their families and to allow the State to meet Federal compliance with the Olmstead Act as it relates to the Americans with Disabilities Act. DHCR owns the NYHousingSearch.gov domain name. The website is a Statewide, online listing and locator service for rental properties, serving both property owners (“Owners”) and prospective tenants. As of July 2022, the website has grown to include 173,410 rental units listed by 3,117 Owners. Over the last year (July 2021 – July 2022), the website was searched approximately 53,258 times a month. To supplement the information online, a New York based customer care support call center (“Support Call Center”) provides inbound and outbound communication to Owners and other users, processing approximately 803 calls per month in the last year. Furthermore, DHCR has developed, owns and manages the Mitchell-Lama Automated Wait List (“AWL”) system which consists of the AWL back-end application and a public-facing online application known as the Automated Waiting List Public Access (“AWL-PA”). The AWL-PA has been serving in its capacity for nearly 20 years for approximately 138 projects. In the State of New York, and especially in New York City (“NYC”), affordable housing is in high demand. Over 50% of renters in the State, in over 1.7 million households, are rent burdened, which means that over 30% of income is spent on rent. [1] Owners often receive more applications than they have units available. The location of the affordable housing development is a factor which decisively affects availability of the order of magnitude of this issue. For example, in NYC, Owners may receive tens of thousands more Applications than they have units available; in other parts of the State, Owners may receive hundreds or a thousand more Applications than they have units available. Currently, Owners conduct housing lotteries, as well as placement on waitlists, manually. Owners with available units in their housing developments advertise unit availability through www.nyhousingsearch.gov . Generally, Owners make Applications available by mail, but also make Applications available in a combination of email and/or online. Once Applications are received for the units, Owners conduct a housing lottery, manually. This can lead to human error, a lack of transparency, and difficulty for HCR to conduct audits on tenant selection and occupancy. While Owners must follow certain steps to conduct housing lotteries, HCR cannot physically oversee every step of the housing lottery process. HCR instead relies on compliance monitoring site visits. Additionally, some steps of conducting a housing lottery may vary from Owner to Owner, such as the method used to randomly select Renters for available unit As a result of the foregoing, HCR has determined the need to modernize and create a website solution to replace the manual housing lottery process, including HCR funded 4% (723 projects with 82,502 affordable units) and 9% (1,518 projects with 75,152 affordable units) multifamily tax credit projects, bond-financed projects, and capital funded projects throughout the State.

HFA seeks a total solution that addresses each of the functionalities set forth in the Scope of Services section of this RFP. To download a copy of the RFP, visit HCR’s Procurement Opportunities webpage at https://hcr.ny.gov/procurement-opportunities .

[1] American Community Survey, 2017