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Lisa Furbush has seen affordable housing compliance from many perspectives. Now serving as Yardi industry principal of affordable housing, Lisa’s career is built on true industry experience, including property management, housing finance agency work and third-party auditing. This level of professional expertise in affordable housing is rare and valuable as the industry evolves.
A career built on learning by doing
Lisa Furbush has sat on every side of the affordable housing compliance table. She spent a decade in property management before joining the Connecticut Housing Finance Authority, where she audited HUD and LIHTC properties on the asset management side. From there she moved to Georgia to lead voucher processing for National Housing Compliance, then joined RightSource Compliance in 2018. When Yardi acquired RightSource in 2020, Lisa came with it.
That journey gave her something most compliance professionals don’t have: direct experience in the same room from four distinct perspectives.
“I have seen compliance from the property, the agency, the auditor and now the technology provider. That diverse exposure to how the industry works taught me that knowing the regulation is important. But, understanding how it affects in the real world is just as important,” said Lisa.
What Lisa’s current role looks like
As industry principal, Lisa tracks regulatory changes and translates what they mean for clients, software and compliance services. She works across Yardi’s sales, development, compliance, research, training and client-facing teams, connecting policy to practice.
“A big part of my job is connecting the dots between policy, technology and what actually happens at the property level. That helps keep me on my toes as no two days are ever the same,” said Lisa.
She also spends considerable time talking directly with clients, agencies and industry partners. That ongoing conversation, she says, is where early signals tend to emerge. “When five different people from five different states ask essentially the same question, that’s usually telling us something important,” said Lisa.
Defining the challenge of affordable housing compliance
According to Lisa, the biggest challenge affordable housing providers face today is complexity. Providers are navigating overlapping federal, state and local requirements, often across multiple programs within the same property, while those requirements and agency interpretations continue to shift.
A single move-in file, she points out, may go through an internal compliance review, third-party review, investor audit and state agency audit, each approaching the same compliance issue from a slightly different angle.
“When compliance feels like a moving target for our clients, our role at Yardi becomes especially important. We work to understand the requirements of the program, the administering agency and the broader industry so we can build forms that accurately capture a household’s story and create workflows that help ask the right questions before a household ever moves in,” said Lisa.
She’s equally direct about what the industry deserves more credit for.
“There is sometimes an assumption that affordable housing is simply multifamily housing with lower rent. In reality, properties can have multiple funding sources, regulatory agreements and compliance requirements layered on top of one another. It’s true that people working in this industry are managing apartments, but they’re also navigating an incredibly complex system designed to make sure housing remains available to the people it was created to serve,” said Lisa.
Tracking HOTMA
Helping the affordable housing industry prepare for HOTMA implementation has become a major milestone in Lisa’s career. HOTMA is officially titled the Housing Opportunity Through Modernization Act of 2016, and its implementation timelines and mandates have been a moving target.
“Getting our solutions to be HOTMA-ready hasn’t been a typical development and rollout process for Yardi. HOTMA is a significant regulatory change that required us to understand not only the federal requirements, but how they would be implemented across different housing programs and by individual state agencies,” said Lisa.
Preparing for HOTMA across programs like LIHTC and Rural Development required coordination across virtually every team at Yardi, including development, compliance, research, training and client services. But what made it particularly meaningful was the reach beyond Yardi’s walls.
Lisa and her team worked directly with USDA and housing finance agencies around the country, including agencies that reached out to Yardi for assistance as they developed HOTMA policies, forms and implementation guidance.
“Being viewed not simply as a software provider, but as an industry resource and partner during such a significant transition is something I’m incredibly proud of,” said Lisa.
See Lisa at YASC in San Diego
Lisa will be at the Yardi Advanced Solutions Conference (YASC) this October in San Diego, where she’ll be part of a session focused on leveraging Yardi’s affordable housing compliance experts for trends, insights and industry updates.
“There has been an extraordinary amount of regulatory change recently,” she says. “I’m excited about creating opportunities for clients to hear what we’re seeing, what we’re preparing for and, most importantly, to ask us questions.”
It’s the kind of conversation she looks forward to every year, not just for what she shares, but for what she learns.
More about Lisa
When she’s not tracking regulatory changes or presenting at industry events, Lisa serves as Vice Chair of the Winder Housing Authority Board of Commissioners. She’s equally at home with a crochet hook, a speed puzzle or on the volleyball court. She’s also a former competitive figure skater who performed with the Ice Capades, which, given the precision Lisa’s compliance work demands, feels perfectly on brand.
