ECHO offers rental incentives to estate agents to place homeless tenants

Austin real estate agents are encouraged to find market-priced housing for homeless people and help one of the city’s leading nonprofit homeless-serving organizations reduce the number of people facing homelessness. housing instability.

Austin’s Ending Community Homelessness Coalition, known as ECHO, has launched its new Realtor Incentive Program, which offers a sliding scale of incentives to secure market-rate leases for ECHO-referred tenants enrolled in support service schemes. Incentives start at $500 and climb to $2,000 for high volume participants.

Funded by a $500,000 municipal grant to promote landlord engagement, the program is part of ECHO’s Community Housing Department.

Paul Mohr, manager of ECHO’s community housing portfolio, said the organization hopes to build more relationships with landlords and management companies who want to work with the city’s homelessness response system and take in tenants with housing subsidies to cover their rent and utilities.

“We’re trying to engage different sectors to see what we can do a bit more in the private market to make more housing available through more leases,” he said. “There’s a pretty big rental market, where often it’s a situation where a landlord has an investment property or a duplex and they want to rent the unit, (and) they’ll contact a realtor to help to find the tenant for this unit.

As a new program, Mohr said there are no stated goals for the number of ECHO referrals placed using grant money, although if all $500,000 is used for incentive payments, they would likely be replenished based on the success of the program in a tight rental market in Austin.

“We’ve never done anything like this before, so we’re going to have to see what kind of units it brings in and what kind of numbers it produces. A lot of that is driven by the rental market, and we’re in a very tight market where unit scarcity is difficult when unit occupancy is high,” he said.

“People see a lot of units coming in when leases are renewed, but there aren’t a lot of units that stay there at a time. The idea is that there are hundreds of homeless people in Austin who have housing benefit and are enrolled in programs who just need a rental unit to use that grant, and we’re looking to bring in as many of these units as possible.

Outreach and awareness raising efforts on incentives are still in their infancy. The Austin Board of Realtors, in an e-mail to austin monitor, said he was continuing his due diligence work on ECHO’s programme.

Data on rental rates for single-family homes and condos in Austin is scattered, but the average price for one-bedroom apartments remains above $1,300 per month, even as single-family home sales have declined in recent months.

Mohr said any increase in the number of available units caused by sellers choosing to make homes available for rent would help with the relief of homelessness in general.

“We try to be innovative in finding housing solutions. In this market, it is hard enough to find housing, and for someone who is homeless, it becomes even more difficult. We have to be creative in our approach to this problem and this is a new strategy for us,” he said.

“In the past, we were better able to convince properties to work with us when they had vacancies. With higher occupancy rates and so much demand for housing, it’s become so difficult because there’s no shortage of available tenants, and we have to find new ways to bring people into the existing accommodation.

The austin monitorThe work of is made possible through donations from the community. Although our reports occasionally cover donors, we are careful to separate commercial and editorial efforts while maintaining transparency. A complete list of donors is available hereand our code of ethics is explained here.