From Scattered Reports to One Live Dashboard: Giving an Established Housing Nonprofit a Clear View of Its Portfolio
A Baich Consulting case study

Housing Opportunity Development Corporation (HODC) is a nonprofit affordable housing developer serving northern Illinois, with 35 affordable housing communities and more in the pipeline. Behind every resident they serve is a property management team responsible for keeping that entire portfolio running well, and that means staying on top of occupancy, financials, and maintenance trends across every building at once.

We connected with HODC through the Northbrook Chamber of Commerce, of which we’re an active member. What started as a conversation about their day-to-day challenges turned into a project that would reshape how their team works.

HODC’s mission is straightforward: build and maintain quality, affordable homes and give residents a stable place to live well. That mission depends on a property management team that can catch a maintenance need early, keep buildings running smoothly, and stay financially healthy.

The Problem: Scattered Data & Hours of Time Used for Analysis

HODC wasn’t short on data.  Their team was already tracking occupancy, financials, and maintenance across every property. What they needed was a faster way to bring it all together.

• Information lived across multiple systems, so a portfolio-wide view meant manually pulling from each one
• Reports took hours to build, because the numbers had to be stitched together from several spreadsheets
• Comparing properties side by side took extra work, even though staff wanted that visibility
• As the portfolio grew, so did the manual lift, every new property meant another spreadsheet to fold in

For a mission-driven team, that wasn’t just an inconvenience. It meant less time for the work that actually matters: serving residents.

The Build: A Dashboard Designed Around How People Actually Work

The ask was reporting. What we built was infrastructure.

Starting with the people, not the data. Becca and Danielle at Baich Consulting led the engagement, and before touching a single data source, we spent time understanding what HODC’s staff needed day to day: clarity, speed, and confidence in the numbers in front of them. Every design decision that followed traced back to that.

One dashboard, every property. Using Microsoft Power BI, we built a custom performance dashboard that pulls occupancy, financials, and maintenance data into a single, comprehensive view, so staff no longer have to search across systems or wait on someone else to pull the numbers.

Designed for comparison, not just review. The dashboard makes it fast to compare performance across properties, so staff can catch trends early instead of discovering them after the fact. That visibility also lets HODC direct time, budget, and attention to the buildings that need it most.

Built for the whole organization. The dashboard wasn’t designed for one team in isolation. Property managers, leadership, and HODC’s Board of Directors all draw on the same live view, so everyone from the field to the boardroom is working from the same current picture.

The Result

“It will give us a clear picture,” said John Kuhnen, HODC’s Deputy Director. “We can see what’s happening across all of our buildings, or in individual buildings, in a way that helps us stay on top of things. Most importantly, it gives our team more time to focus on the people we serve instead of manually pulling reports.” For HODC’s property managers, that shift shows up in small, daily ways: and extra visit to a property instead of an afternoon on spreadsheets, a maintenance trend caught before it becomes a larger repair, more time on the ground with residents.

Why This Matters Beyond One Nonprofit

This project reflects something we see across almost every organization with whom we work: the challenge usually isn’t a lack of data. It’s that the data lives in a format built for record-keeping, not for decision-making. Multi-property portfolios are especially prone to this, since the complexity tends to build up gradually, one property, one manager, one spreadsheet or report at a time, until the whole picture is difficult to interpret.

The fix isn’t a better-looking report. It’s treating reporting as infrastructure: built once, built correctly, and available when someone needs an answer.

Baich Consulting works organizations to turn operational data into automated, decision-ready reporting. If your team is still piecing together information from multiple systems before every board meeting, let’s talk.