Inside Pennrose’s Centralization Effort, Where Creative Use of Data Has Led to Significant Organizational Efficiency

For large affordable housing developers, managing contracts with public housing agencies (PHAs) and recouping income lost to delinquent rent can present significant organizational challenges, and inefficient execution of either function can result in significant blows to operations.

At Pennrose — a Philadelphia-based developer with a nationwide portfolio spanning over 220 projects — strategic re-organization of both functions has yielded dramatic results. Over just a few years, the company shifted contract management away from individual property managers and into the hands of a centralized process while simultaneously creating an alternative approach to addressing and tracking delinquency for its entire portfolio.

Centralizing Contract Management
During the COVID-19 pandemic, personnel on Pennrose’s compliance team noticed that the organization was leaving a sizable chunk of potential contract-based revenue on the table. At the time, site managers at Pennrose’s individual properties across the country were handling contract administration, in addition to all of their property management duties. This contract administration required careful auditing of contract language against what the firm actually received from PHAs, resulting in sometimes significant gaps in income.

“You might have a site team that doesn’t have a lot of experience with contract administration.” says Heidi Keeny, director of revenue at Pennrose. “We tend to ask our site teams to cover many critical functions at the properties, the technical aspect of contract administration may not get the attention it requires.”

The piecemeal distribution of contract administration duties, combined with high turnover rates for property manager positions, can lead to a disjointed relationship with the PHA, Keeny explains.  “When you have close to 100 contracts spread out across 75 to 100 different people, it’s difficult to manage a consistent strategy,” says Keeny.

This can also create a headache for individual property managers, who may be asked to manage multiple types of contracts — each subsidizing specific units — within one project. “We have so many different programs that have their own types of rental restrictions,” Keeny says. “Contracts can vary in complexity, format, and function. Understanding the mechanics of each contract and the interplay they may have with additional layered programs at a particular property can be overwhelming.”

In order to ease this burden, Keeny partnered with Pennrose senior management in December 2022 to develop a new role — positioned within Pennrose’s national offices — dedicated to managing contracts and cultivating stronger relationships with PHAs across the organization’s portfolio.

Keeny was then selected to fill the role after senior management approved its creation, which she says allowed her to optimize Pennrose’s PHA partnerships. “One of the beneficial parts about centralizing this function is developing a deep understanding of each type of contract, whether it’s a project-based, Rental Assistance Demonstration, a HomeFlex agreement, or various others,” Keeny explains.

The results were striking, with year-over-year subsidized revenue increases in the double-digit percentages. Keeny says the internal systems and relationship continuity with partner PHAs have been the keys to these marked boosts in revenue. “It’s really been a matter of understanding the contracts, building really good relationships with our housing authorities and different agencies that the contracts are administered through,” says Keeny.

On an internal systems level, Keeny says she and the Pennrose team have developed a method to optimize contract-based revenue by tracking the entire portfolio down to the unit-by-unit level.

“The way we’ve set up our technology systems, I can look at a unit and in a second, I know every program, restriction, and composition of that unit. Developing a deep knowledge of the programs through my compliance experience, I know how they work together,” Keeny says. This allows her to zoom out and look and make more informed project-wide decisions. “That’s how you’re able to execute a strategy to maximize your revenues at that property,” she continues. “That’s really what we’ve done: Marry the data with deep industry expertise to create a centralized platform that leads to exceptional outcomes. And that’s been a game changer.”

A Non-Confrontational Approach To Rent Delinquency 
Since the pandemic, rent delinquency has posed a complex and urgent set of issues for developers. Rent delinquency rose during the pandemic, while eviction moratoriums and mounting backlogs in housing courts limited developers’ tools for recovering revenue lost to delinquent rent.

As COVID emergency funds dedicated to rent assistance have dried up, delinquency has remained a persistent issue for developers; one low-income housing provider in the Seattle area reported being out as much as $4 million in unpaid rent as of May 2025. Meanwhile, operating costs have increased faster than consumer inflation, presenting an urgent threat to the financial viability of low-income housing developments.

Different firms have different definitions of delinquency, and for Pennrose, delinquency is classified in terms of both length of non-payment and scale of open balances. By November 2024, the company had 850 tenants meeting their definition of delinquency — not an insignificant number across a large, national portfolio. These conditions prompted Pennrose begin implementing a set of changes to its delinquency management protocols, all aimed towards an ambitious goal: how do we reduce these 850 delinquent accounts to 200 as efficiently as possible.  

The key to their new approach? A fundamental reframing of rent delinquency strategy.

“We needed to look at our strategy as encouraging successful current and future occupancy,” says Jason Newman, vice president of asset management at Pennrose.

“We recognize the delinquency for what it is,” Newman says. “The likelihood of collection for severely delinquent accounts is incredibly low in our industry. We tend to focus a lot of resource towards these balances without evaluating the best pathway forward to improving the overall health of our portfolio.”

For Pennrose, this meant creating alternative approaches to interacting with delinquent tenants. First, Pennrose assigned four different intervention tiers based on the severity of delinquency. They then gathered as much data as they could on each delinquent balance to analyze the facts and circumstances that lead to tenant delinquency and developed a standardized approach that can be deployed from a centralized resource center to actuate specific strategies at both the portfolio and site levels.

At the portfolio level, Pennrose implemented a legal module from the real estate software company Yardi to centralize legal case tracking across their portfolio. “This gives us a much better view of what’s going on at a macro level across the portfolio, and encourages a workflow at the site level for when we do provide notice, when we send a case to an attorney. It provides a pathway for a property manager to navigate the legal process more efficiently,” says Newman.

At the site level, the entire collection process can create a sour relationship between a site team and its tenants, which may lead to compounding issues down the line. “For a big portion of our tenant bases, receiving impersonal notices from your landlord does not often lead to a positive interaction,” says Newman. This not only increases economic vacancy but can lead to a costly shutdown in communication. Tenants may become avoidant of the property management team and “less likely to communicate repair and work order issues, which could lead to more costly repairs later. And if they’re not coming in and recertifying, then we have the risks of non-certification on our hands,” he says.

The organization works with tenants on early intervention and eviction prevention outreach programs, supported by a centralized data strategy. “If a resident has traditionally been a great resident and our data supports they can maintain successful tenancy going forward, [the property managers] now have a playbook to guide a decision to continued occupancy,” says Newman. If the tenant does not “have an opportunity for successful tenancy going forward, we need to leverage the legal resources available to us as efficiently as possible with the support of our legal module,” Newman says.

The change in strategy has produced remarkable results: As of last month, the number of tenants meeting Pennrose’s minimum criteria for delinquency tracking has dropped from 853 to 254 — a nearly 71 percent reduction in less than a year. Further, though there are still new tenants entering their delinquency-tracking mechanism, “the severity is much less,” Newman says. “We’re able to intervene much earlier,” he says, preventing tenants from entering the severest tiers of delinquency.

Newman says that despite their significant progress, Pennrose remains focused on further refining their approach to addressing delinquency and preparing for ever-looming economic uncertainty. “As the cost of the basic necessities increases, that’s going to carry a lot of burden for our tenant bases,” he says. “So we’re going to have to determine from an overall organizational strategy standpoint, how we adapt and work within that, and make sure that our tenant bases have the resources that they need to be successful.”