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Spencer Levy
Doing good and doing well do not have to be in conflict when it comes to affordable housing, which by some estimates now includes a shortage of up to 7 million units nationwide. We've talked about this issue before on our show, both in terms of capital-A Affordable with regulated income restrictions, and lowercase-a affordable. That is, alternatives for the heavy cost burden many Americans face when it comes to paying the rent. One area we haven't given a deep dive is how innovation in tech are taking on these challenges. On this episode, a pair of startup leaders discuss the range of issues facing the sector and the ways their business models are making an impact on the persistent problem of providing housing affordability.
Atticus LeBlanc
You can take this model of housing that's existed since the founding fathers. I mean, Alexander Hamilton rented a room. So you can take this model that's been around for centuries and actually make it scale across geographies in a way that had never been possible before.
Spencer Levy
That's Atticus LeBlanc, Founder and CEO of PadSplit, the largest marketplace in the U.S. for co-living. Founded in 2017, the platform provides access to shared housing with a stated mission to, “solve the affordable housing crisis one room at a time”. Atticus also serves as an executive with two Atlanta-area companies working in the affordable housing sector: Stryant Investments, a developer, and Stryant Construction.
Christine Wendell
There's a lot of areas where technology can be introduced in affordable housing that a lot of the other software providers aren't touching, just because they are more focused on market rate.
Spencer Levy
And that's Christine Wendell, Co-Founder and CEO of Pronto Housing, a four-year-old startup focused on streamlining affordable housing access and compliance through software and tech-enabled service solutions. Christine is also a principal at Dure Investment Group, which specializes in New York multifamily affordable housing. Coming up, innovation and affordability, new approaches to solving what some have called a national crisis. I'm Spencer Levy, and that's right now on The Weekly Take.
Spencer Levy
Welcome to The Weekly Take with two leaders in the space who could make affordable housing both more available and more supply. Starting with Christine Wendell, CEO of Pronto Housing. Christine, thanks for coming out.
Christine Wendell
Thanks for having me.
Spencer Levy
Great to have you. And Atticus LeBlanc, CEO of PadSplit. Atticus, thanks so much.
Atticus LeBlanc
Appreciate it, Spencer. Happy to be here.
Spencer Levy
Great to have both of you. So for the benefit of our listeners, just give us the basics of your approach to your respective businesses, starting with you, Christine.
Christine Wendell
We provide software to streamline the income certification process for affordable housing. So when people apply to affordable housing, it's similar to market rate where they have to qualify, but it's a much more detailed process. I should add, since this is going over to Atticus shortly, that I am talking about regulated affordable housing. So these are multifamily projects that have regulatory agencies, regulatory programs, so that could be a federal program, a local inclusionary housing program, some sort of contract that says you have people that have to be within a certain income bracket and usually have to be within a bunch of other characteristics in order to rent this unit at a below market rate. And so Pronto is like TurboTax for that process, where it streamlines putting together that certification package. We work with property owners and managers across the country. We're in 20 states today, and we work with a really wide range of programs from LIHTC and project based vouchers, those federal programs that are the largest programs, all the way to a whole bunch of local programs that are usually managed by market rate managers.
Spencer Levy
And, Atticus, what is your specific approach to affordable housing?
Atticus LeBlanc
We're a platform that provides access to shared housing for the 50% of Americans who can't afford the rent, so that anyone in need can transform their lives and save a bunch of money in the process. And as a two sided marketplace, we earn a fee from the owners of these homes who leverage our platform to double their income. So essentially, we try to make housing both more affordable by also making it more profitable. A lot of people always think, oh, we have to create more units, we have to build more units. But it's not just that you have to build more units necessarily, it's that you can use what we have already built much more efficiently than we have been.
Spencer Levy
Christine, tell us a little bit more about your technology and why it is part of the solution to solving the supply-demand imbalance in affordable housing.
Christine Wendell
Yeah. So in my past life, I was an asset manager and I oversaw lease ups that had an affordable housing component, and it took over a year to fill the affordable units. So even though new property had been built, there was supply available at the below market rate, they were sitting vacant for over a year. So the whole point of Pronto is to make it faster to qualify someone and to get someone into that unit so that you can add to that supply as quickly as possible. There's also the annual compliance process that makes housing more accessible so that people can stay in housing. It's a multifaceted approach. The traditional process for someone qualifying for a regulated, affordable unit is that they come in person, fill out a bunch of forms by hand, bring all of their documentation, so this is pay stubs, bank statements, every asset statement, birth certificates, social security cards, really every document you can think of. They probably forgot something, so they probably have to come back into another in-person appointment. Basically this very exhaustive process in person. So the first piece is, make it a lot easier and more accessible for the resident. Make it so that they can do it on their own time, on their phone. Pronto has a helper feature so they can add their adult child or caseworker to help them submit this documentation. And it's a really easy interface. So that's on the resident side. Then on the property team side. Overall in the industry, there's a huge staffing problem. So you see property managers are having a ton of trouble hiring people, filling roles, and particularly people who have compliance knowledge, knowledge of the specific affordable housing complexity. And so Pronto makes it so the software is selecting the forms, populating them, putting them in the correct order, helping with the calculations, everything that is set up for that particular affordable housing program on that particular property.
Spencer Levy
So Atticus, let's turn to your approach now and the way we talked about your product or the way you approach housing in the precall was, it reminds me a lot of the more efficient use of cars that people started using with Uber or with with Lyft, or basically taking an existing product that is used 10%, 20%, 30% of the time and taking that utilization up to 50, 60, 70% of the time. And so you wouldn't have to create more product, even though we're all in agreement that more product is part of the solution. Tell us about that.
Atticus LeBlanc
Everyone is generally aware that the first bedroom or a studio unit has the highest rent per square foot. Beyond that, as you get to larger and larger units, there are diminishing returns. A two bedroom unit is not worth the same rent per square foot as a one bedroom. A three bedroom is worth less. Four bedroom would be worth significantly less. This is just the nature of things. It has nothing to do with how PadSplit is set up, but it's just the natural pricing paradigm. We can ultimately take a larger unit and price that first bedroom, because we can rent individual bedrooms in a shared space at, say, 70% of the cost of a typical studio. So it is far more accessible and affordable than anything else that the user, the renter, might see on the open market. But because it is in a shared space, you now have the situation where instead of diminishing returns, the second bedroom is now worth exactly the same as the first bedroom. The third is worth the same as the first. The fourth is worth the same as the first, and so forth, and you reach this tipping point. In multifamily, it typically occurs around just two bedrooms, 2 or 3 bedrooms. In single family it happens around four where you end up getting significantly higher net revenue from renting individually by the room than you would renting the entire space itself. And so just fractionalization generally is how we optimize the pricing.
Spencer Levy
So we have an episode on this show where we had a representative from Greystar, maybe the largest multifamily owner manager in the world, talking about co-living. And the co-living model was essentially micro units, or much smaller individual units, that then had much larger common areas. And the common areas there were the kitchens, the bathrooms, other places to congregate. Is that what we're talking about here? Doing co-living in a much smaller setting, meaning not for the whole building if it's multifamily, but in a single family setting as well?
Atticus Leblanc
Exactly. Yeah, it's very, very similar. And we have multifamily units as well. We've done multifamily units. We've done converted motel units, converted office to residential units. The majority of our inventory is single family, but it's the same concept in that how do you look at a space entirely. To Christine's point, focus on the needs of the actual user, the renter in this case, and design what they need, but nothing else. Focus on what they need and making the product as affordable and accessible as possible so that from an owners perspective, they are allocating the use of their real estate as efficiently as they can to drive the highest revenue. And in doing so, they are also making that space as affordable as it can possibly be.
Spencer Levy
Christine, give us a sense of the scale of your operation. How big is it today? Where do you want it to go and why?
Christine Wendell
So we have about 30,000 units on the platform today, and the goal is to help all regulated affordable housing with their compliance as efficiently as possible. So we continue to expand to new states. We continue to expand with our customers across their portfolios. And we also work with both ownership groups, managers, and then sometimes directly with the regulatory agencies if they are responsible for doing the compliance themselves, which just depends on the program. Today we're really focused on that certification process. So either for application or for the annual recertification. And as we look kind of into our product roadmap, we want to be the technology solution for everything in affordable housing. So finding housing, applying to housing, going through that annual compliance, thinking about the reporting. So we have a lot of work to do. And there's a lot of areas where technology can be introduced in affordable housing that a lot of the other software providers aren't touching, just because they are more focused on market rate, they have more expansive functionality, versus Pronto is exclusively focused on affordable housing.
Spencer Levy
Having now taken my brokerage license test and, including updates every year for fair housing for both my DC and Baltimore license, I am well versed in what fair housing laws are, certainly in Baltimore, Maryland, and in DC. But they're different in different jurisdictions. How do you deal with the idiosyncrasies of differences in local law?
Christine Wendell
So you point out the difference in the regulatory agency, but what you didn't point out is the quirks of compliance professionals across the industry, right. So I want my form filled out with a checkmark or an N/A or a zero. And sometimes that is driven by the regulatory requirements, but sometimes it is driven by, you know, Sandra who has been doing compliance for 15 years. And this is exactly how she wants that form filled out. And so Pronto, the whole platform was built to be configurable. So to give our customers either for regulatory requirements or for their own preferences, the control to say what forms, what order, how are those forms filled out, and therefore to be set up in a way that meets the requirements for a specific property.
Spencer Levy
So, Atticus, I know you run into the same issues, and the issues that you run into are, state, local, primarily about how many families are allowed to live under one roof top. Among other things, before you start dealing with the issues of how do people accept a co-living versus a demised space where, again, safety may be a consideration. What's your point of view?
Atticus LeBlanc
We're a marketplace. And we don't own the individual homes. And so we really think that the people who are close to the problems are the best equipped to solve them. And in this case, your point, different markets have different rules. The owners in those markets are generally acutely aware of what those rules happen to be. And so our role as a marketplace is to be adaptable so that people can decide their own given solutions. We absolutely run into certain zoning issues, less so in multifamily zoned areas, as opposed to single family zoned areas. And as you highlighted, there are often distinctions around how many unrelated persons are allowed to live together in a home, that in some cases go back to brothel laws. Some of them are overtly discriminatory in nature, and have been around for way too long considering it's 2024. Some of the ones that I like to pick on. Chesterfield County, Virginia, which is the county surrounding Richmond, allows no more than two unrelated persons, but as many domestic servants as you would like. And so you could classify all the residents as domestic servants and be okay under that zoning law, which is really just pretty mind blowing, that we're actually having that discussion in this day and age. But alas, from our perspective, there's nothing about these laws that is not discriminatory. And so when we have to, we absolutely fight them, usually on constitutional grounds. Fair housing grounds is another big one. And listen, there are existing Supreme Court cases that should be the law of the land. There was a case, City of Edmonds v Oxford House in 1995 that should have ruled out a lot of these zoning laws, but they're still in place. And every locality often has their own definition of family. Why we couldn't come up with one on a state, regional or national level? I do not know. And that's probably well above my pay grade, Spencer.
Spencer Levy
Well, let's go there for just a moment, because I think this patchwork of definitions, this patchwork of zoning, this patchwork of dare I say it, I can't believe it took me 30 minutes to say it, NIMBYism, not in my backyard-ism, seems to be the stickiest of all sticky wickets. Agree or disagree, Atticus or Christine?
Atticus Leblanc
Absolutely agree. And I think, look, I mean, the local policy makers are in a tough spot, right? Because they're voting constituents who are, in many cases, most active happen to be those same NIMBY homeowners. So even if that elected official or policymaker understands that we have this supply shortage in the US and we need better solutions because you don't want full time workers, as highlighted recently in the Washington Post. You don't want full time workers that are effectively homeless. And that is a problem that I have seen across my career and over the last 15 years in the affordable housing space. And so you want to address practical solutions, but when you have that voting constituency of people who are vehemently opposed to any legitimate solution, it becomes incredibly difficult to move forward. And so our approach has been, look, we'll fight those legal battles for you, but we're going to push first because of some very basic premises, which is we think the employees that work in your communities at least deserve the opportunity to live in them. And it's better for everybody. It means there's lower traffic. You're moving people closer to work. You can actually have the local restaurant that needs to hire people actually employ people. Those people can save money in the process and not have to drive an hour and a half or 2.5 hours to where they might otherwise qualify for housing. The environmental benefits are significantly better as well, because you don't have to go build new apartments. You can actually reuse what's there. So the benefits go on and on. And ultimately at this point, our history, if you look at the amount of dollars expended on an average basis to build new construction, we would have saved local taxpayers over $2 billion in the amount of housing that we've reused. And meanwhile, we've saved residents well over $80 million in the amount that they would be paying in traditional housing costs. So it's a win-win. But yeah, there's always going to be a difficult fight, I think. And it's frankly just a little bit silly.
Spencer Levy
Christine, let's talk about how you encourage new supply. The one thing that investors want more than anything is certainty. They want speed. And how does your product provide those two things that could lead to more supply?
Christine Wendell
Pronto makes it easier to qualify someone for affordable housing. We've seen across the country that a lot of regulatory agencies have introduced local inclusionary programs. Sort of ironic, Atticus, that they haven't then revisited the single family zoning at the same time, right? We're going to require any new multifamily project to have 15% of affordable units. But, God forbid six people who aren't related live in the same home, right? So when you have these new multifamily developments, you have market rate developers who are like, I don't know how to go through that process. And that's where Pronto comes in. So, we can work with them to set up the regulatory requirements. Then for affordable focused managers, often we see that because financing is becoming more expensive, it's not just, okay, for the last 30 years I did LIHTC properties. But now they have LIHTC and home and project based vouchers and a local program. So they have to have these, they call it blended certifications, so these layers of compliance, and Pronto help streamline that too, so that you can have one process across a portfolio, even as you have property-specific requirements.
Atticus LeBlanc
To jump in quickly, Spencer, I had a pretty controversial thesis when I started the company, which was that if you really wanted to solve affordable housing, you had to demonstrate how it was more profitable than other alternatives, because the investors and humans in general will follow their own incentives. And if the affordable option happens to be the most profitable, that's the one that they're going to take more often than not. And why I really appreciated the elegance of this co-living solution is because you can do both, and across 30,000 plus days now, and over a thousand investors, we've seen that it is consistently two times more profitable on a net operating income basis compared to what they were doing before. And that's why so many of those same investors have gone on to repeat over and over and over again. And whether you're talking about a platform like PadSplit or Housing Choice Vouchers or Low-Income Housing Tax Credits, I think we have to be cognizant of the fact that the incentive is ultimately driving all of these investment decisions, and as soon as you take away that incentive, then, of course, you can't expect anyone, whether they are a nonprofit entity or a real estate investor, to go try to pursue these types of programs. And everybody needs income at some point in time.
Spencer Levy
I've said on this show many times that it has to be profitable to get it done in scale. Is that the message you want people to hear, Atticus?
Atticus Leblanc
Yeah, it absolutely is. I mean, it's how I ended up here. I started buying single family homes in early 2008, when the crash had happened, but was not yet public. And the reason I arrived at the solution was because I had done one of the probably the first people to see this opportunity in single family housing and single family rentals at scale. But comparing PNLs between SFR versus commercial versus multi versus rent by the room, it was very easy for me in comparing PNLs over the course of seven years to see this rent buy the room thing really just beat the pants off of everything else. And so then the question for PadSplit became, how do you take this model, which requires a tremendous amount of operational complexity, and make it scale? And we created this services platform to be able to do that. And, I don't think it would have been possible 15 years ago, maybe not even ten years ago, but because of the advent of electronic payments processing technology, IoT devices, all of a sudden you can take this model of housing that's existed since the founding fathers. I mean, Alexander Hamilton rented a room, so you can take this model that's been around for centuries and actually make it scale across geographies in a way that had never been possible before.
Christine Wendell
I just wanted to jump in on the conversation about that double bottom line, right. Both Atticus and I have mission oriented companies, and he's talked about how it's profitable in the single family space. But I do want to circle back to the multifamily space and how you don't need to give up a market rate return. And I think that that is where policy and regulatory agencies come into play. For example, in New York, if you underwrite a multifamily property with market rate taxes, it doesn't pencil, right. You cannot build a market rate property with market rate taxes and make a good return. That's why New York has, previously 421-a and now 485-x, where basically in New York, that's the example, but in cities across the U.S. you're seeing this where regulatory agencies, government agencies, are recognizing what's in my toolbox that I can give an owner and incentivize them to build affordable housing and give them something that gives them a market rate return. So that can be a density bonus. It can be a real estate tax abatement. For project based vouchers or for section eight, you get a market rate income stream, but you have that rent subsidized by the government. So I 100% agree that you shouldn't have to give up that market rate return. And you can do that in multifamily. And where we're seeing that kind of come to fruition is that there's a lot more institutional capital going into regulated affordable housing. With Nuveen buying Omni, Blackstone buying AIG’s affordable portfolio, April Housing a couple of years ago. And you just see a lot more affordable-focused funds now than you did maybe five years ago.
Spencer Levy
One of the things that most people don't realize is that when you're staying in a Marriott or a Hilton hotel, your hotel is not owned by Marriott or Hilton. It's owned by somebody else. It's a third party. We call that asset-light. And if you take a look at the valuation of the Marriott versus host, which actually owns the hotels, is that the management company’s typically worth more from a multiple standpoint, that is the underlying real estate. So both of you, correct me if I'm wrong, have chosen an asset-light model. Tell us about that. Why you chose asset-light, and do you think you'll ever move into ownership?
Atticus LeBlanc
Yeah, I can start. I mean, for me again, I was a real estate investor. I still am a real estate investor. We have an affordable housing development portfolio personally, and I was an expert in a subset of the Atlanta market. And I was acutely aware that I was an expert in this particular geography and nowhere else. And I firmly believed that there were people like me in every other market, and it was not a good use of my time or energy or the company's time or energy to go try to become experts in Topeka or Boston or Seattle, versus focusing on the subset of tools and services that the experts that are already in those markets would need in order to address the housing issue. And I really created the company to try to solve this problem of affordable housing. Not that I needed to own everything. The examples that I give are like, think about when I started the company in 2017, I think Airbnb had 6 million listings and Invitation Homes, which was far and away the largest SFR owner, had like 60,000 houses. Okay, well, 60,000 houses versus 6 million is not even close. And so if you're building a company to solve a problem, I think asset-light can just be way more efficient, even if the market cap is lower. In many cases you get a higher multiple, as you alluded to, Spencer. But Invitation Homes is still a pretty large company, right? It's clear that either model can work. The question is just what is the scale and what are you trying to solve for as a company?
Christine Wendell
I would echo that an asset-light model and a technology platform is much more scalable. Pronto’s whole goal is to make housing more accessible, both for the investors to manage their compliance, investors and operators, but then also for residents. I also have a separate company that invests in affordable housing, but I don't have never-ending capital that it would take to build as many homes and manage as many homes as are needed. And so with Pronto, we can help owners and managers both who might have a similar investment thesis to my other company, Dure Investment Group, as well as those who have a really different approach and who are serving a very specific population. And then I would take it one step further in terms of Pronto does work directly with regulatory agencies. And one thing we talk to the regulatory agencies about is given the confines of resources, you often do have to pick who you are prioritizing in your community. I'm not personally going to put a horse in that race in terms of who should be prioritized, but we do give regulatory agencies the tool to be able to say, okay, we want to prioritize teachers, for example. Let's set up a questionnaire where we ask everyone in this community about, you know, do you work for the public school system? If yes, let's process those people first. So when you think about the policy implications there, we do provide that lever where communities can make decisions for themselves.
Spencer Levy
Let me bring up yet one more pushback I'm going to get from some of our listeners, which is if you're in a co-living situation and you don't get to pick the people that are co-living there, how do you handle that issue, Atticus?
Atticus LeBlanc
Yeah. Again, the most powerful tool that we have is the ability for people to transfer at a moment's notice across the network. I mean, we have 14,000 units across the country. And whether you move jobs or we actually had somebody who relocated to Las Vegas because they wanted to pursue a career in sports betting. Whether it's a situation like that, or you just don't like your roommate's choice in cooking, you can always transfer. So that's the most powerful tool.
Spencer Levy
You have complete ability to move from unit A to unit B, no transaction costs, don't have to pay the full month's rent. How does it work? You go from unit A, unit B.
Atticus LeBlanc
Yeah, I mean, so there is ultimately a move-in charge, which is effectively like a cleaning fee that covers the turn costs of an individual room. As any asset manager, property manager knows, your turn costs tend to be a pretty significant part of your pro forma, and there is a fee to cover that turn cost. What's interesting is when units are fully furnished, the cost to quote, turn a hotel room, for instance, is much lower typically than it is to turn an entire apartment. And so that average across our platform ends up being about $81. And so when a resident usually pays about 100 bucks to make that transfer, it's not going to break the bank. And if they really have decided that sports betting is in their future, then they go ahead and do that. Or if they really decide that, gosh, Spencer, I really can't stand you as a roommate.
Spencer Levy
Yeah. That happened before.
Atticus LeBlanc
Yeah. And it's really, really bad. PadSplit will step in and cover that cost for them. But yes, it's a key part of our offering because we don't do any showings beforehand. There are no tours of these units. It's, you book them as if you were booking an Airbnb. And so it is sight unseen. But to build that trust, you build it on the back end by letting them know you can transfer if you ever are inclined to do so.
Spencer Levy
Which sounds a lot to me like the subscription model to co-working in certain ways at some of the large co-working companies, as well. You know, this week I'm in Las Vegas, next week I'm in Portland, Oregon, and there's a office available for me. Is that what we're saying here?
Atticus LeBlanc
It's not totally dissimilar. The major difference is in co-working, typically the co-working company is the one collecting the revenue, whereas for us, the owner or the host is actually collecting the revenue or the overwhelming share of it. The confidence that we have to provide for the owner is that we're going to backfill that unit really, really quickly. Right now, across the country, the average time to refill that room is less than nine days. So as long as we can refill that room very quickly with a resident who wants to be there, then we can provide a pretty significant value proposition.
Spencer Levy
So your primary alternative for the individual living in one of your units could be an extended stay, lower-end hotel. And what is the pricing difference between staying at one of these lower-end, extended stay hotels versus a unit in one of your properties?
Atticus LeBlanc
Yeah, we're probably 60, 65% of the cost of an extended stay hotel. But you're right, that is an option that a lot of people are looking for. And the reason why we see probably 60 to 65% of the folks that move in with us ultimately do so to save money for some thing. In some cases, it is, I don't have a deposit to pay on my own apartment. I want to have my own apartment. As Christine alluded to, but I don't have the money to be able to save. And if I move into that extended stay hotel, there's no way that I'm going to be able to save it. So they'll stay with us for six, eight months, save up the money to get that deposit on their next apartment. In some cases, it's buy car, start a business, buy house in some cases, or a condo, and then move on. And then about 15 to 30% of cohorts just basically stay forever because they're on fixed income or don't have that same upward mobility.
Spencer Levy
So this is now the crystal ball portion of today's discussion. We're all in agreement. We want to solve the affordable housing crisis. If I could solve affordable housing and public schools, I’d consider it a victory and go home. But, Christine, you are the president for a day. What would you do if you were to say, this is what I'm going to do to solve affordable housing? What would be your first couple of steps?
Christine Wendell
In my fantasy land, I would just say snap 7 million units in transit-oriented, dense locations, build up towers around those train stations. Done. And that assumes all of the financing is figured out. All of those investors got market rate returns. Great. Okay, so let's say that that's not possible. Then my sort of next tear down would be something I think Atticus will probably add too, which is change the zoning laws to make development with its complex, layered nuances, which is how buildings are built today. Make it so that you're not grappling through ULURP, right? So that you don't have to change the zoning. And you can just, as of right, build dense housing, hopefully with an affordable component. And then the third layer down, which I would say is still like a wish list item, would be something that would probably put Pronto out of business, but happily, which would be something like the Common App of affordable housing programs. So right now, one of our real value propositions is that we can handle the layered programs, different regulatory requirements. But why are there so many different requirements? Why can't it just be, there's one standard way of calculating income? I don't think I really need to worry that Pronto is going to be put out of business, because the regulatory agencies are never going to agree in terms of qualifying people the exact same way. But if we could, if we could have one standardized way which just would streamline the whole process, that would be amazing. And it would make it much more simple for residents, applicants, managers, really everyone involved.
Spencer Levy
Atticus, president for a day. How would you solve the affordable housing challenges we have today?
Atticus Leblanc
If I'm the President of the United States, and I know we're all probably believers in federalism to some extent and local control and all of those things, but I would probably ensure that the federal government did not fund those cities that we know have discriminatory zoning laws on the books. That would include federal transportation funding, housing funding, etc., because we're just working against ourselves there. And so I think seriously examining where are the zoning rules and other regulatory hurdles that are in place on a local level and use the tools that the federal government does have, which is funding those entities and institutions? And then I think the second thing would just be understanding the alignment of incentives, and really doing a deeper dive in terms of… I saw HUD recently put out an RFI for looking at direct assistance through the Housing Choice Voucher program. So rather than giving people vouchers, just giving them cash, which I think is an amazing direction to head towards. It's something that we've experimented with in the emergency financial assistance for rent relief through our existence, and have had just extreme success with. But when you think about the number of people that we need to provide housing or assistance for and the overall size of the infrastructure necessary to allocate those dollars, I would venture a guess, and I would feel pretty confident in the fact that if you just gave the dollars directly to the people, that you would allocate that funding much more efficiently, even with some generous allocation for fraudulent activity, than the way that we're currently using it. And let those people make their own decisions. Again, I think the people who are closest to the decisions are best equipped to solve them. And that includes the people who are deciding whether or not to buy food or pay rent or pay their heating bill or pay their water bill. I think generally we don't give people who are close to the problems enough credit for being able to make the decisions that are in their own best interest.
Spencer Levy
Well, thank you, Atticus, for that great answer. Great answer, Christine, and great discussion overall about affordable housing innovation. Starting with Christine Wendell, CEO of Pronto Housing. Great job, Christine. Thank you so much for coming out today.
Christine Wendell
Thanks for having me.
Spencer Levy
And then Atticus LeBlanc, CEO of PadSplit. What an interesting concept, idea. Thank you, Atticus.
Atticus LeBlanc
Thanks so much, Spencer. Really, really appreciate it.
Spencer Levy
And thanks to you for joining us, as well. Tell us what you think about the episode or what you'd like to hear more about in the future. We'd love to hear from you. So please visit CBRE.com/TheWeeklyTake and reach out directly using the Talk to Us button on your website. You can also share this episode and subscribe to the show there or wherever you listen. We'll be back next week to talk about other big current issues in commercial real estate investing, including a roundtable featuring organizational leaders from CoreNet Global and NAREIM, the National Association of Real Estate Investment Managers. We'll also take a trip to Principal, a global financial services firm based in Des Moines, Iowa, and more. I'm Spencer Levy. Be smart. Be safe. Be well.
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