Northspyre Helps Affordable Housing Developers Overcome Obstacles at Novogradac 2025 Conference


Northspyre Helps Affordable Housing Developers Overcome Obstacles at Novogradac 2025 Conference

Earlier this month, Northspyre attended the Novogradac 2025 Affordable Housing Developers Conference in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The annual conference brings together trusted professionals with extensive Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) experience for two days of learning, thought leadership, and networking. Panel discussions at the event focused on common obstacles and real-world issues LIHTC developments face and offered strategies to optimize investments in affordable housing properties. 

Here’s a closer look at our presence at Novogradac, including insights and key takeaways from the Data, Development, and Decision-Making panel. 

Why Was Northpsyre at Novogradac? 

Novogradac brings together real estate professionals with extensive investing, developing, consulting, and accounting backgrounds on affordable housing projects. Northspyre’s Ryan Raghoo, Real Estate Transformation Consultant, had the opportunity to share his perspective as a panelist in a session titled Data, Development, and Decision-Making, which explored how the right information can empower affordable housing developers to make smarter decisions.

Experts on data-driven development used the panel to show how market studies, operating expenses (from the past and future), and other data are vital to succeeding on affordable housing projects. Raghoo offered attendees a deep dive into how Northspyre, as a leading end-to-end development tool, offers affordable housing developers a single source of truth instead of using siloed spreadsheets to manage this key project data. The platform’s Complex Capital Management tool, which is specifically designed to help navigate complicated source requirements, was highlighted as being particularly useful to LIHTC developers who need to meet the 50% test.

Inside the Data, Development, and Decision-Making Panel and Northspyre’s Unique Insights 

Ryan Raghoo, who joined Northspyre with a background managing affordable housing development projects, participated in an expert panel moderated by Novogradac partner Kelly McNany Gorman; Fellow panelists included Orlando Valdes, President of Business Development at Ion Water; David Arriola, Director of Lending and Chief Credit Officer NCRC; Renée Tanguay, VP Originations, Stratford Capital Group; and Eric McMahon, President, Select Development. 

To open the discussion, Raghoo explained how Northspyre, a development management platform, has aimed to support the affordable housing development industry through a suite of tailor-built tools.. Raghoo first explained how the platform’s ability to pair sources and uses to facilitate tracking against the 50% test. “The system will automatically understand what source is funding a specific use, giving a clear line of sight into how you’re drawing down all those sources in real-time,” Raghoo explained. Developers will be, as a result, better prepared at the end of a project for audits, able to show sources and uses immediately without wasting time digging through emails or outdated, disorganized spreadsheets. 

Raghoo also noted that source and use tracking is essential to meet the modern challenges of affordable housing development, where visibility into aspects of the project such as water consumption, construction costs, and insurance is more important than ever. He discussed how as a Project Manager, the faulty system he was most familiar with and many teams continue to rely on is disparate spreadsheets that silo teams and make locating information more difficult. Raghoo used draw requests as an example, noting how the draw may offer a snapshot into the financial state of a project at one moment, but fails to layer in exposures and can quickly become out-of-date or fail to capture the bigger picture. “Using spreadsheets, it’s difficult, or even virtually impossible to take that information and leverage it at an organizational level,” Raghoo noted.. 

Northspyre unifies project information, offering a single source of truth for developers working in affordable housing, allowing them to unify and analyze key data on a project. “Northspyre, by bringing everything together, gives you a clear line of sight on today and down the road, it empowers folks to aggregate data into benchmarks and leverage institutional data to inform decision-making on current and future projects,” Raghoo said.  

Book a demo with Northspyre to learn more about how the platform’s Complex Capital Management functionality facilitates successful LIHTC projects for affordable housing developers. 

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