I didn't choose affordable housing - it chose me.
Thirty-three years ago, I was a single mom with an art degree and two young sons, living in an artist's loft that happened to be financed through the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program. I had no idea that experience would shape my entire career, or that I'd eventually become one of the people helping to finance and preserve those same kinds of properties.
I learned property management from the ground up, became an asset manager, a compliance monitoring agent, and helped to shape preservation policy for the State of Minnesota after the market crash. I've worked with small and large nonprofits and bring those skills to building truly unique products.
What I learned along the way: the staff are dedicated, but the software is broken
Not merely flawed or imperfect - fundamentally broken for the organizations and agencies that need it most. I've watched a trend of software companies promise revolutionary solutions to affordable housing for decades, only to end in abandonment after the sale when implementation takes "too long" or budgets are "too small" -- or staff are simply too thin to complete the set-up needed.
The arbitrary rearrangement of numbers for stakeholders has become more burdensome than any paper system in the history of humankind. Meanwhile, brilliant people in critical positions have discovered the hoard of Excel workbooks and cobbled-together systems that leave them behind in the digital gap. Lacking capacity for enterprise solutions is now no longer an option. Think of the Azure portal as the circuit breaker. You will be needing an electrician handy.
So I built what should have existed all along.
Free The Data isn't just another software platform, it's the arc of a story. Freeing up place-based nonprofit affordable housing organizations to do their mission is an immediate and critical path in the US. Asset management is only getting tougher. Portfolios are aging, resources are scarcer than ever, staff burnout is rampant, and compliance demands keep growing. But the tools haven't evolved to match the complexity of the work or the reality of nonprofit budgets.
I've been the single mom who needed affordable housing. I've been the compliance officer drowning in paperwork. I've been the asset manager trying to make sense of scattered data. And I've been the executive director watching staff (and myself) burn out on redundant workflows of picayune detail for no apparent reason and non-existent or half-baked software that do nothing but further exacerbate the daily workflow of inefficient systems across our programs and industry.
I became the person who can fix it.
I'm building beautiful, accessible, and high-functioning tools for asset managers and property operations teams. I can scale these to your portfolio and staff size to identify what's important, name the problem, and help you streamline your workflow and priorities. I focus on effective, actionable, and measurable oversight of property operations.
How we do it:
I've worked with organizations of every size - from 20-unit CDCs to 13,000-unit portfolios - all of them nonprofits or government agencies. I know every stage of the lifecycle, the funding process, the partner relationships, the regulations, the reports, the software challenges. I've assembled a small but might team who have helped to build accessible and affordable solutions. Dashboards, apps, automations that help asset managers bring their best to the role while finding life/work balance. We have built a knowledge base and library to support readymade and custom-built OpenAI and Copilot agents. We focus on Microsoft-native and integrated solutions, designed by someone who's lived every constraint your organization is facing.
What's coming next.
Here's the reality: Microsoft ends Windows 10 support in October 2025. Right now, thousands of affordable housing nonprofits are running on outdated systems with servers tucked away in a closet, and PCs that are nowhere near cloud-ready. If you are one of those, you are not alone in feeling scared, not knowing where to start, and more than ever feeling the undertow of daily crises that leave no time for technology planning. If that's not enough to get your attention about what's in store, feel free to whistle right past the graveyard of your transition to 11 and consider the arrival of Windows 12.
Changes like this could take you by surprise. Don't let that happen. It might anger you being forced to move at the pace of the mothership. You're not alone there, either.
My heart is here: our CDCs and NDCs and large nonprofit owners, developers and property managers are irreplaceable. We're about to watch executive directors with 30 years of institutional knowledge and deep neighborhood connections get steamrolled by a tech transition they can't navigate alone.
Not on my watch.
Free The Data isn't just a platform I built - it's a platform I host. It's my spin on Platform as a Service is to teach people how to fish. The risk at this very moment is how many small nonprofits won't make it without some fast private capital, and we need to help them on the pathway to using modern, cloud-based tools that won't leave them behind. We need to ensure that our frontline people are free to actually do the most important work in our communities -- and take care of themselves while doing it -- and that means keeping up and keeping together, instead of getting swallowed up by the black hole cloud forever.
My goal is to be a beacon and a guide, to equip you to stay on top of opportunities and a step ahead of risks. Because the work you do matters, and you deserve tools that actually work.
Need a hand? Let's talk.
Jane Loechler
jane@twocentsconsultants.com
30 + years in affordable housing • Microsoft Founders Hub Start-up • Building an Arc
