Affordable Housing Navigator Expands to Existing Buildings!
OPEN Technologies is working to bring insights on building performance and retrofit potential to existing multi-unit residential buildings, in addition to the new construction in the tool’s original scope.
As you may recall, in 2021, OPEN Technologies was selected as one of the fourteen projects to be awarded funding in the first round of the CMHC Housing Supply Challenge. This allowed us to develop the Affordable Housing Navigator, a tool that allows developers of non-profit housing to quickly find the right balance between construction costs, energy performance, and climate resilience in new development projects.
Throughout our consultations with stakeholders (housing providers, development consultants, and capital providers), it became clear that – in addition to the new construction focus of the original scope – there was a need to expand the scope of this project to include additional functionality to track the current performance and retrofit potential of existing non-profit housing.
OPEN has received support from CMHC to achieve greater outcomes for housing providers, including:
- assessing the retrofit potential of their existing portfolio and prioritize which properties are best candidates for retrofit incentives and financing, and;
- assessing the acquisition and conversion potential of existing market housing.
Over the coming months, OPEN will tailor our existing GRID benchmarking, disclosure, and performance analytics software tool for this use case, and integrate it into the existing Affordable Housing Navigator tool. The data insights that GRID provides help to drive resources to where they can achieve the greatest climate benefit, whether for an individual property or for thousands of buildings at a time through smart policy and capital deployments.
We can’t wait to bring this project to life, be sure to watch this space for more updates and information to come!
Are you a non-profit housing provider or consultant, or do you know of someone who may be interested in learning more? We’d love to hear from you! We will be running discovery and design interviews through the month of June, so if you can help us to shape this toolkit to best meet your needs, please email us at ahn@opentech.eco.