A Twin Cities company announced today it’s helping build a deeper pool of affordable housing for low-income residents.
Renexus Technologies of Eden Prairie has donated its TracFax platform to Urban Homeworks, allowing the nonprofit to better organize its data while identifying and upgrading residences throughout Minneapolis and St. Paul for families struggling to find somewhere to live that is affordable. Renexus Technologies of Eden Prairie is a leading innovator of cloud-based technologies for property owners, managers, owners, developers and maintenance services industries.
Urban Homeworks transforms vacant properties in Minneapolis and St. Paul into dignified housing resulting in a network of high-quality rental units, stable homeownership, and engaged, powerful people working toward positive change. The company has chosen Renexus’ applications because they enable quick communication among all property stakeholders from anywhere through mobile or desktop devices.
“TracFax has been an amazing tool for us for two reasons,” said Chad Schwitters, executive director of Urban Homeworks. “First, it centralizes some of our scattered-site activity and uses technology to bridge those geographic differences. We can manage our contracting duties, including payments, using photos and geo-tags rather than running people around town to get stuff done.”
The software program also “allows us to build a preferred set of contractors within the tool and direct more work to our local businesses, which are often minority owned,” Schwitters said. “Then, they can get work outside of their immediate neighborhood. We can post their work on TracFax and give exposure to these contractors.”
Whether accessed on a PC atop a desk or a smartphone carried on the go, the TracFax software eliminates a significant amount of duplication in data entry. For example, when a property manager reaches out for maintenance, prospective service providers can submit their proposals through TracFax for the property manager to review. Those proposals and related contracts are gathered in one location for easy scrutiny. The next year, the project can be duplicated and sent out with entry redundancies eliminated.
Tony Swendsrud, Renexus Technologies’ president, is excited about the TracFax software’s potential to help a worthy cause.“We are proud to partner with Urban Homeworks and support the dedicated people driving this important initiative to create affordable housing in Minneapolis and St. Paul,” Swendsrud said.”
Schwitters also anticipates a significant financial benefit to using TracFax and looks forward to applying the software to the overall management of Urban Homeworks’ 150 or so single-family and small multi-unit residences. “We’re going to make our dollars stretch further and have a bigger impact for those who benefit from our work,” he said, “allowing us to hire more people and stabilize more homes for people in our community.”