U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Building the Property Review Template

Client:

U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)

Challenge:
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Office of Evaluation (OE) monitors the condition of the Federal Housing Administration’s (FHA) Multifamily portfolio with the ultimate goal of helping FHA reduce the incidence of default among FHA-insured loans. FI Consulting and Thomas and Herbert Consulting, LLC have helped the OE pursue this goal through our mutual support of their Online Property Integrated Information Suite (OPIIS) since 2003. OE recently asked FI Consulting to identify new ways that FHA staff could take advantage of OPIIS -- a centralized database of information relating to new and existing properties in FHA’s multifamily portfolio – in support of their day-to-day activities.

FI Solution:

FI created the Property Review Template (PRT) to provide a basic framework for analyzing the relationship between the financial performance of multifamily properties and their surrounding local market conditions. The PRT integrates local and metropolitan area specific historical and forecasted indexes for rent levels, rent growth rates, and vacancy rates with FHA property and financial statement data. Our analysts designed and built the prototype tool, fully documented the process, implemented the PRT, and trained users through comprehensive scenarios and case studies.

FI Impact:

The PRT provides a straightforward and robust mechanism for the integrated analysis of historical property performance and market conditions using familiar desktop tools. Most analysts, project managers and other FHA staff are familiar with and comfortable in the Excel environment. Further, the PRT supports the type of property-specific analysis that is commonly performed across the commercial real-estate industry with respect to underwriting, asset management, and loan servicing.