Agaric serves Housing Finance Agencies

Your state's housing finance agency, or HFA, is a crucial part of the needed effort to make housing affordable to people looking to buy or rent homes.  By financing housing that low- and moderate-income people can afford, HFAs build stronger communities.

Agaric is honored to serve housing finance agencies in this mission by helping with their web development needs.

What HFA Websites Need

From our experience working with housing finance agencies, here are some of the main features we know are essential for HFA websites:

• modern, uncluttered, and attractive in appearance 
• easily managed multimedia content
• a structure that make content easily discoverable
• contact forms with email notification systems that ensure HFA staff reliably respond to inquiries
• accessibility and the tools for content editors to consistently make content accessible
• translation capabilities and clear distinctions between automatically-translated, human-translated, and official original language pages and documents

Agaric will deliver all these requirements, and more.

What HFAs Need from Technology Partners

In their web development provider housing finance agencies want honesty, quick response time, easy communication, breadth and depth of expertise, and reliable service at a competitive price.

You can find all these qualities in the Agaric Technology Collective.  Your project manager, your front- and back-end developers, your content specialist, your accessibility consultant, your system administrator, your quality assurance team, and more are all owners of Agaric and more-than-metaphorically invested in giving you the best service possible.

Ask Agaric about ways we can help your housing finance agency.

Specific capabilities for HFAs built by Agaric

Below are a few examples of features Agaric has delivered to two of our HFA clients – North Carolina Housing Finance Agency and Vermont Housing Finance Agency – that demonstrate our experience.

Discoverable Content

HFAs share all kinds of information: educational materials, news articles, financial and organizational reports, loan provider directories, financing applications.

It is tremendously important that site visitors are able to easily find content they are looking for and to discover new content that interests them. 

Content listing pages with filters are a great way to achieve this objective. 

One example of this on the North Carolina Housing Finance Agency website is their directory of mortgage lenders.

The directory is conveniently searchable so loan seekers can easily find lenders in their area. Each listed lender has a convenient button that links to a form for contacting them.

All of this data is managed in a database maintained separately that is made accessible via an API that the website syncs data from. Using an API as a centralized source of data saves the need for staff to manage data in multiple locations. 

Sharing Information

Communicating the agency’s work to the public is also a key part of an HFA’s activity.

Making news, blog posts, press releases and other content easily discoverable is an important part of an HFA site.

North Carolina Housing Finance Agency’s website features a news page where articles can be filtered by year and to some pre-defined article types.

Vermont Housing Finance Agency has a similar news page for filtering their news content:

Webforms

As service providers, HFAs need to be responsive to people looking for service, so reliable contact forms are a must.

Today the web is flooded with bots that crawl sites and add artificial submissions, so tools that help filter out bad submissions are a required feature.

Agaric makes sure that your webforms are filtering out bad submissions through the effective use of CAPTCHAs and user submission email confirmations.

Here are two screenshots of NCHFA and VHFA's webforms.

Contact Us for Help with Your HFA Website

Agaric has had a great time serving our HFA clients and we would love the opportunity to share our skills and experience with more housing finance agencies.

If you are interested in working with us please contact us so that we can set up a meeting to discuss how we can help with your site.