If you own or manage multifamily housing properties, you know there are many risks to consider daily, including fire danger, water damage, electrical issues, and property security.

Unfortunately, there's no way to prevent all accidents and incidents. It's impossible. Mitigating these risks is just part of the job. Luckily, there are several common-sense building upgrades that can help property owners, property managers, and maintenance personnel do that job. These upgrades can limit or completely prevent devastating losses—saving time, money, and most importantly, lives.

Ariana Parker works in HAI Group's Human Resources department, with a focus on recruiting top talent to work for the company. Part of the job includes explaining the benefits of HAI Group's culture and work environment to job candidates, aspects Parker learned about first-hand through her participation in HAI Group’s internship program.  

Before Matthew Higgins joined HAI Group’s business development team, he learned the ropes of commercial property and liability insurance through HAI Group’s internship program.  

If you’re a high-achieving housing agency looking to continuously improve your operations, getting accredited with the Affordable Housing Accreditation Board (AHAB) is a great next step. AHAB, an independent organization, has been accrediting affordable housing providers nationwide since 2018 based on eight standards developed by the housing industry. To help you learn more about the benefits of accreditation, along with the process, HAI Group’s Staci Canny sat down with Jeff Weslow, assistant director of AHAB, to get a closer look.

Your organization's IT team, in-house or contracted, serves as one of its front-line defenses against cybercriminals. As cybersecurity attacks become more common in the affordable housing industry, there's no better time to evaluate your IT team's ability to:

HAI Group has seen an increase in the frequency and severity of several different loss areas. Over recent years, this trend has included a rise in fatal building fires and security-related issues such as shootings and assaults.

A flood is defined as a condition where two or more acres of normally dry land or two or more properties are inundated by water or mudflow. Floods are among the most common and deadliest natural disasters in the United States and affect every region of the country, causing severe property damage each year. Just an inch of floodwater can cause as much as $25,000 in damage, according to FEMA.

Odds are, if you’re in the multifamily affordable housing industry, your to-do list is already frighteningly long. Even so, if you aren’t yet testing for radon, you may want to consider it. Radon is the second-leading cause of lung cancer behind smoking—long-term exposure to the odorless, colorless gas is responsible for around 21,000 deaths in the U.S. each year, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency—and can expose property owners to liability in certain circumstances. 

We tend to fancy our passwords as undecipherable, but the data clearly shows otherwise: 60% of the breaches analyzed in Verizon’s 2021 Data Breach Investigation Report leveraged weak or stolen passwords. Cybercriminals aren’t just guessing our passwords; they’re making well-informed guesses. They can use several methods and tools to hack passwords, such as programs that record keystrokes, social engineering (e.g., phishing), and password dictionary databases with lists of the most commonly used password phrases.

Insurance isn’t optional for multifamily affordable housing organizations (or anyone, for that matter). To that end, part of our mission at HAI Group is to make the process of securing and using coverage in times of need as reasonable and straightforward as possible for our customers.