Latest: List at SWERN, but also elsewhere

Just heard from one more source supporting the view that landlords with housing to offer the disaster recovery effort may have to register at www.SWERN.gov for tax purposes, but they should not rely on SWERN to bring them tenants. To make actual timely connections with disaster-displaced tenants, the increasingly consistent recommendation is to list at the Disaster Housing Resources (DHR) site, which is the online listing resource being offered through hurricanehousing.net. In addition, a huge number of the state housing tax credit administrators, including outside the South, are still calling urgently for offers of vacant units.

As we noted last night, HUD is now giving a version of this double request in its guidance for "faith-based and community organizations." It is saying large-scale offers of housing go to SWERN and small-scale ones go to DHR.

The NMHC site, which appears to have excellent sources, says large "non-cash, non-housing" offers of resources go to SWERN, while the most recently updated portion of its property listing advice still urges landlords who have registered at SWERN to "resubmit" information about vacant housing units to hurricanehousing.net. (NB: another section of this NMHC page states SWERN is saying it has transferred housing information to hurricanehousing.net. The SWERN site was in fact saying this last Friday (9/9) but the site had removed all references to hurricanehousing.net as of Saturday (9/10). Probably resubmitting information is a good idea in all cases.) [UPDATE 9/17/05, also posted above: NMHC has posted a very clearly written new page that asks for available units to be entered into hurricanehousing.net even if they have already been entered at SWERN, saying "...(We are no longer confident that the information will be automatically transferred into www.hurricanehousing.net.)..." It then adds that landlords willing to lease blocks of 10 units or more to FEMA should "please continue to submit that information to private.sector@dhs.gov." NMHC adds, "We have attempted to avoid the duplicative request, but now believe it is the only way to avoid creating dozens of state and local databases and to avoid any further delays in moving people from shelters into short- and long-term housing."]

As we know, the IRS does require owners and managers of tax credit properties to list them at www.SWERN.gov in order to benefit from the waivers in IRS Notice 2005-69. (A copy of the notice is now available online from the IRS itself in its Advance Notice list.) The IRS requirement hasn't changed.

So it does seem like registering in both places -- both at SWERN and at DHR -- is the safest, most useful thing to do, and we haven't yet heard of any reason not to double-register.