Ann Korczak of SPONY testifies on landlord portal bill for small owners

Hi, good afternoon.

My name is Anne Korczak, and I serve as the board president of SPONI, the Small Property Owners of New York.

And we wanted to speak today, or I wanted to speak today, regarding 1424 and to thank Councilmember Morano for introducing it.

This bill addresses a problem that many small owners experience regularly.

The city's housing agencies need to bring their technology and administrative systems into the 21st century.

We've seen the value of this approach because just recently, Congress, Councilman Banks introduced 1023, which would help modernize the HPD building registration process.

So the Councilmember Morano's bill applies the same kind of common sense principle to rental assistance programs.

Small owners often don't have property managers or administrative staff.

And these processes, especially if you're not dealing with the agency regularly, it's very difficult to deal with many of the hurdles that one faces when

dealing with placing a voucher tenant into a unit of housing.

So the proposed portal would provide a centralized way to upload documents, manage

payment and information, enroll in electronic payments, track payments, all these things would just really lighten the administrative load for small housing providers.

So again, we thank Councilman Marano and Chair, thank you for this hearing today.

I listened to most of the testimony and I think especially the first panel that spoke about their

firsthand experiences with challenges and dealing with the programs was really very moving.

And I hope that, you know, some of the changes that you're discussing here today can help the process for them as well as the members of my organization.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Thank you for your testimony.

Yes.