News

April 4, 2026

Some sites get passed over not because they're genuinely infeasible, but because the first evaluation asked the wrong questions. A deal that doesn't work under one set of assumptions can work under different ones.

April 1, 2026

The most obvious sites for affordable housing development are already being evaluated by everyone. Non-obvious sites — former commercial properties, underutilized institutional land, parking lots — are where leaner teams can find real opportunities.

March 29, 2026

There is a category of housing that's rarely discussed: housing that was never proposed because the decision to pursue it was never made — deals that could have worked, but never entered the pipeline.

March 26, 2026

In affordable housing development, not every site works with every capital structure. The relationship between a site's characteristics and the capital stack it can support is one of the central determinants of feasibility.

March 23, 2026

The affordable housing shortage is routinely described as a land problem, a capital problem, or a political problem. But there's a constraint that shows up consistently in data and practitioner conversations that doesn't fit any of those categories.

March 20, 2026

Before any project is proposed, approved, or built, a development team decides whether a site is worth pursuing. The aggregate of those private decisions is a significant driver of housing supply — and largely invisible to policy makers.

March 17, 2026

Infill sites are harder to develop than they look — not impossibly so, but harder in ways that are easy to miss if you're evaluating them with the same checklist you'd use for a greenfield site.

March 14, 2026

The cost of missed deals in affordable housing doesn't appear on anyone's balance sheet — but it's one of the most underappreciated constraints on affordable housing production.

March 11, 2026

Affordable housing deals are rarely financed by a single source. Understanding how subsidy layering works — and why it shapes what actually gets built — is foundational to understanding affordable housing development.

March 8, 2026

A practical explanation of how competitive LIHTC allocations work, why applications succeed or fail, and what the process means for how development teams approach site selection and deal design.

March 5, 2026

There is a gap between what affordable housing policy intends and what it produces — and the least-analyzed part of that gap is at the site level, where viable development opportunities go unevaluated.

March 2, 2026

Public-private partnerships are the dominant structural model for affordable housing production in the United States. The model works — but it has a persistent execution gap. Software has closed similar gaps in other sectors where public and private systems intersect. Affordable housing is behind.

February 27, 2026

Software markets tend to emerge at a specific moment: when the problem has existed long enough that practitioners are genuinely frustrated, but early enough that the infrastructure needed to solve it is just becoming available. Affordable housing is at that moment now.

February 24, 2026

Affordable housing has a capital problem — but it's not the one most people describe. In the current environment, a meaningful share of the production gap isn't explained by capital scarcity. It's explained by capital deployment speed.

February 21, 2026

Real estate runs on Excel. This is not a criticism — it's a structural observation about how a highly fragmented, relationship-driven industry organizes information. It's also where data goes to die. Building a defensible data moat in an analog industry isn't about scraping public records faster.

February 18, 2026

The standard framing of the affordable housing software market starts with LIHTC as the primary demand driver. That framing is accurate but incomplete. The more interesting question is what the TAM looks like if you start with the problem that LIHTC is one instrument for solving.

February 15, 2026

Institutional capital has been moving into affordable housing at a meaningful pace. The problem that capital consistently encounters isn't a shortage of theoretical opportunities — it's a shortage of deals that have made it far enough through the development process to be investable.

February 12, 2026

Housing policy has been moving faster in the last five years than at any point in the previous three decades. For most observers, this is a story about politics and housing supply. For a narrower set of observers, it's also a story about software.

February 9, 2026

We've been asked to describe our engineering culture, and we want to do that honestly — which means not describing what we aspire to be, but what we actually are right now, at this stage.

February 6, 2026

The capital stack is the financial architecture of a real estate deal. In affordable housing, capital stack construction is extraordinarily complex — and currently managed primarily in spreadsheets. We think that's a fundamental mismatch between the problem and the tool.

February 3, 2026

Building a product culture in a legacy industry is different from building one in a tech-native market. The differences are specific and worth naming — not because they're obstacles, but because they shape how we think about shipping, learning, and what it means to move fast.

January 31, 2026

Zoning codes are among the most information-dense, inconsistently structured, and widely misunderstood documents in American public life. They're also the regulatory foundation for most of what we build — which makes translating them into a usable UI one of our defining technical challenges.

January 28, 2026

Before we wrote a line of production code, we watched affordable housing acquisitions teams work for fifty hours. Not fifty hours total — fifty hours per team, observing how real practitioners move through the process of evaluating a site from first look to go/no-go decision.

January 25, 2026

There's a version of proptech that's primarily a data business. There's a different version that's primarily a workflow business. We're building the second thing — not because data businesses are bad, but because the more durable opportunity is to be where the work actually gets done.

January 22, 2026

We have an internal metric we care about that doesn't appear in any of our investor updates: time to no. Time to no is the average time it takes an affordable housing development team using Alpha Deal to reach a confident decision that a site isn't worth pursuing.

January 19, 2026

The team building Alpha Deal includes people who came from real estate before they came to software. That background shapes how we build — and it's one of the things that makes the technical problems we're working on genuinely hard in a way that's worth explaining.

January 16, 2026

Building a platform for affordable housing development means building for a domain that is locally specific, regulatory complex, and resistant to standardization. This is not an easy problem to build around. It's also, for the right kind of engineer, an unusually interesting one.

January 13, 2026

There's a version of site evaluation that takes weeks. There's also a version that takes 30 minutes. Both exist. The question is knowing which one a site deserves — and being disciplined enough to run the 30-minute version before you commit to anything longer.

January 10, 2026

Underwriting is where you build the model. Site evaluation is where you decide whether it's worth your time to open the spreadsheet. Confusing them is one of the most common ways lean acquisitions teams burn capacity on deals that shouldn't have made it past the first hour.

January 7, 2026

The 9% Low-Income Housing Tax Credit is among the most competitive financing mechanisms in affordable housing development. Understanding what actually drives a competitive application isn't academic — it's the difference between winning an allocation and losing one.

January 4, 2026

Pre-development — the messy, time-intensive, research-heavy work that happens before a project is financially structured — has been largely ignored by proptech. That's not because the problem is small. It's because it's hard to see from the outside.

January 1, 2026

The engineers who care about the specific problem we're working on are the ones who make the work better. And the specific problem we're working on is unusual enough that it's worth describing honestly.