The Research and Development Division exists to serve as an internal consulting unit for the Real Estate Assessment Center, taking the REAC’s considerable resources of raw data from years of Physical Inspections, Financial Assessments, and overall Public Housing Assessments, and turning it into value added products that can be used to serve other divisions across REAC, REAC executive staff, and partner program offices across HUD. 

R&D produces Data Analysis and Statistical Reports, both regularly as book of business and on an ad-hoc basis, that provide valuable information such as the state of the National public and assisted housing portfolio. R&D uses its data, statistical, econometric modeling, and information technology capabilities to serve as an internal Quality Assurance (QA) unit for all of REAC, collaborating with other divisions to ensure that REAC’s core products, its Sub-Systems and overall Assessments, are delivered to the highest level of accuracy and validity possible. R&D’s data analyses, statistical abstracts, and validation efforts support a culture of data-driven decision making within the Department. 

In addition, R&D is responsible for researching and prototyping new value-added business tools for customers, partner divisions, and partner offices. In the past this has included partnering outside of REAC to create a tool that increased the occupancy rate for Public Housing on a national scale (through greater utilization of existing housing inventory across the universe of 1.1 million low rent public housing units), and prototyping a diagnostic report that provides a financial peer to peer comparison for every Public Housing Authority (available to HUD/PIH field office staff via a Business Intelligence application).