Agency seeks statutory access to landlord and grand‑list data for housing dashboard and needs assessment

Department staff told the House Committee on General and Housing that they are building a public dashboard to provide near‑real‑time visibility into units coming online and want access to a set of administrative data sources to verify units.

Alex Farrell said the dashboard combines satellite imagery, 911 data and other administrative sources and that the department would like grama list (grand‑list/landlord certificate) data integrated into the dashboard. “This would put in statute essentially forcing the software company to let us use that grama list data for this purpose,” Farrell said. The department described the landlord certificate as the tax‑department form that landlords file and said VHFA has used such data for housing‑needs assessments.

A VHFA representative told the committee that VHFA currently has agreements to access tax‑department data for housing‑needs assessments and for updating housingdata.org, and that the landlord certificate changes passed last year have an effective date of July 1 for the new data sections. Committee members asked tax‑department witnesses and VHFA to testify about data availability and privacy hurdles in later hearings.

The department said it is already working with multiple state agencies and that clarifying statutory access would smooth routine data transfers for the dashboard and research. Committee members requested follow‑up testimony from tax, VHFA and the department to clarify what fields are available, what is missing and what statutory changes—if any—are needed.

Ending: The department and VHFA agreed to coordinate testimony with the tax department and to provide more granular details in upcoming hearings about which data elements will be available for the housing dashboard and housing‑needs assessments.