Why I Built Voucher Match

I own rental properties in Binghamton, New York, and a sizeable portion is Section 8 housing. For most of last year I had vacancies I couldn't fill, which sounds like it shouldn't be a problem given that there are thousands of people in New York holding housing vouchers and actively searching for a place to live. And yet there I was, a landlord who specifically wanted voucher tenants, unable to find any.

The statistic that I kept coming back to (and that eventually pushed me to build something) is that over half of all housing vouchers expire unused. People apply for rental assistance, wait years to get approved, receive a voucher, and then lose it because they can't find a landlord willing to accept it within the 60 to 120 day window they're given. Meanwhile I'm posting on Zillow alongside hundreds of other listings, hoping that a voucher holder happens to scroll past mine and somehow intuits that I'm one of the landlords who will actually say yes.

The whole thing started to feel absurd. We were looking for each other. The infrastructure to connect us just didn't exist.

The Two-Sided Problem

Voucher discrimination gets covered a lot, and it should. Families face rejection after rejection. Landlords ghost them or invent reasons to say no. It's demoralizing and, in New York at least, it's illegal (not that enforcement is particularly robust).

What doesn't get as much attention is that there's a subset of landlords who genuinely want voucher tenants. The economics make sense if you understand how the system works: guaranteed rent from a government agency, tenants who tend to stay longer because moving is such a hassle with a voucher, and less turnover. I'm one of those landlords, and there are others.

But there's no way to signal that. Zillow doesn't have a "voucher friendly" filter. Neither does Craigslist or Apartments.com or any of the major platforms. So voucher holders end up scrolling through the same listings as everyone else, sending inquiry after inquiry, mostly to landlords who will either ignore them or find a reason to decline. And landlords like me post on those same platforms and get buried in applications from people who don't have vouchers, with no efficient way to reach the people we actually want to rent to.

It's a matching problem, where both sides of the market exist, but they can't find each other.

Why the Time Pressure Makes Everything Worse

The voucher expiration window (usually 60 to 120 days, depending on the program) sounds reasonable until you actually walk through what a housing search looks like.

You find a listing that might work. You reach out, and maybe you hear back in a few days, often you don't hear back at all. If the landlord is interested, you schedule a viewing. Then there's an application, a background check, an inspection by the housing authority. Each of these steps can take a week or more, and any of them can fall through for reasons that have nothing to do with you.

Three or four failed attempts and your voucher is gone. You're back to the waiting list (if there even is one open), and the cycle starts over.

The landlords who would happily accept vouchers often don't advertise it because they don't want to deal with a flood of inquiries, or they're not sure how to navigate the paperwork, or it just doesn't occur to them to mention it. So voucher holders burn weeks pursuing landlords who were never going to say yes, while the landlords who would say yes sit there with vacancies.

I don't think this is anyone's fault exactly. It's more that the tools people use to find housing weren't built with vouchers in mind. There's AffordableHousing.com, which does have a voucher filter, but it's clunky and most landlords don't know it exists. The voucher-friendly listings get buried alongside income-restricted properties and other subsidized housing that works completely differently. And nobody has bothered to build something that was designed for this specific matching problem from the ground up.

What I Built

VoucherMatch is a rental listing site where every property accepts vouchers. That's the core idea - if it's listed on VoucherMatch, the landlord wants voucher tenants.

The site is live at vouchermatch.nyc. I'm starting with New York City because that's where the need is most acute and because I know this market reasonably well.

I've also been building out tools for landlords (inspection checklists, rent tracking, the paperwork management that makes voucher tenancies more complicated than regular rentals). Part of the theory here is that if you make it easier for landlords to deal with the administrative overhead, more of them will be willing to accept vouchers in the first place. Whether that's true remains to be seen.

The Chicken and Egg Problem

Marketplaces are hard to start because they only work when both sides show up. Tenants won't use a site with no listings. Landlords won't list on a site with no tenants. Someone has to go first, and there's no obvious reason why anyone should.

I'm trying to solve this the slow way: reaching out to landlords who I know accept vouchers, building tools that are useful even before the marketplace has liquidity, writing about the problem so that people who care about it can find me. It's not a fast process.

If you're a landlord in NYC who accepts vouchers (or who has considered it but wasn't sure how to find tenants), I'd like to hear from you. Listing is free, and the tenants who find you through VoucherMatch are specifically looking for landlords like you.

And if you work at a housing authority or a nonprofit that helps voucher holders with their housing search, I think there's something to talk about here. This isn't a problem that one person with a website is going to solve. But it might be a problem that a website can help with, if the right people know it exists.

Why It Matters

Half of housing vouchers expiring unused is a policy failure, but it's also (maybe more so) an infrastructure failure. The policy exists and the funding exists. The people on both sides exist - what's missing is the connection between them.

Marketplaces fail all the time, usually because they can't get past the cold start problem. But the alternative is that vouchers keep expiring, families keep losing housing, and landlords like me keep wondering why it's so hard to find tenants who have guaranteed rent.