Our mission: connect people with a place to call home
We are the “front door” to Massachusetts affordable housing. We care about fairness and access – for both housing and technology. We are problem solvers with a mindset toward bringing data into the policy-making conversation. We stay ever-mindful of what works for the people hoping to find their way home every day using our tools. As of mid-2025, about 40,000 people use our search tool every month–more than 400,000 unique users a year.
We improve transparency around availability and around our state’s housing inventory as a whole, advancing racial and economic equity. Our data informs what affordable housing Massachusetts has so we can chart the path toward what we need.
We strive to make everything we produce as functional, understandable, reliable, and beautiful as the equivalent product created by the for-profit market.
Housing Navigator Massachusetts started with a 2018 brainstorming session drawing together housing funding agencies, property owners, homelessness service providers, tenant advocates and local government. Thirty-one people around the room united on a goal: “How can we make it easier to find and apply for affordable housing?”
By August 2021, we took our first step toward that goal, launching our innovative housing search tool. We’ve kept growing from there, including making transparent more than 10,000 accessible (ADA compliant) homes and creating unique availability features like short waitlists. Our collaboration continues. More than 80 owners are active with us, and service providers rely on our site daily to support people looking for housing.
Housing Navigator MA was a 2023 Ivory Prize Top Ten, selected from 203 nominees for “ambitious, feasible, and scalable solutions to housing affordability.” We were honored to be included in the Mass Technology Leadership Council’s Tech Top 50, in the Consumer Tech category for 2022 alongside tech giants like Toast and Salesforce. The Council called us “a hidden gem of a nonprofit.”