An applied academic institution at the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business, Ivory Innovations is dedicated to supporting innovative solutions in housing affordability. They recently announced the Top 25 Finalists for the 2024 Ivory Prize for Housing Affordability. These finalists will join the 122 other companies in Ivory Innovations’ network of innovators dedicated to advancing housing affordability.

Finalists are divided into three categories (Construction & Design, Finance, and Policy & Regulatory Reform) and have demonstrated innovative, achievable, and scalable solutions to the housing affordability crisis. The Top 10 will be announced in April, with the final winners to be announced in May.

Without further ado…

Construction and Design

Apis Cor: Develops homebuilding construction materials and mobile 3D printers that are smaller than most others on the market and ready to work within 30 minutes of arriving on the job site.

Capsule:  Produces a streamlined construction workforce online as their team of engineers, machines, and assembly technicians manufacture buildings as components.

Canvas: Designs and develops worker-controlled robotic machines for contractors to make drywall finishing safer and more attractive to a shrinking pool of skilled labor.

Onx: Combines proprietary X+ Construction technology, design, and advanced material science expertise in concrete.

On3: An AI/mobile-based learning application for fieldworkers in construction, trade contractors, and manufacturing industries that allows companies to capture their critical work processes in video, create multilingual video-based learning modules, and use AI to verify retention of critical knowledge among frontline personnel.

PathHouse: A modular housing solution that uses Design for Manufacturing and Assembly (DfMA) techniques to address the nation’s housing problem. By combining carbon-sequestering mass-timber products together with our SmartCassette, the result will be the production of over 50,000 housing modules per year within four years.

Revalue.io: Leverages resources from utilities, government and community programs to provide local minority contractors access to a sustainable pipeline of projects to increase the skilled labor workforce and diversity within the construction and energy industry.

TANGOBuilder: Uses AI to automate buildings’ structural design by turing architectural sketches into construction-ready blueprints in seconds.

Villa: A homebuilding platform that focuses on building prefab homes in “missing middle” infill locations by partnering with factories to build homes based on Villa’s designs.

Finance

Foyer: Offers a membership for homeowners to access personalized financial planning with a First Time Homebuyer Savings Account to help them reach homeownership goals faster and more responsibly.

HIAS Housing Guarantee Fund (HGF): Provides financial backstopping for refugees’ first leases in the U.S., reducing risk to housing providers and increases housing access, affordability, and stability for recently arrived refugees.

Home Lending Pal: Makess the process of determining eligibility for HUD vouchers to pay for a mortgage and other home-buying assistance programs scalable, efficient, and user-friendly by automating the analysis required to assess eligibility criteria.

High Opportunity Neighborhood Partners: A full-service real estate company that acquires quality homes in High Opportunity Neighborhoods to provide them along with supportive services (Services Enriched Housing) to Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher holders.

Montgomery County Housing Production Fund: The HPF is a $100 million revolving fund that provides low-cost construction financing for the development of publicly owned, mixed-income housing. The Housing Opportunities Commission (HOC) of Montgomery County, Maryland partnered with Montgomery County to create the Housing Production Fund (HPF) in 2021. The HPF is now expected to produce as many as 2,000 new housing units in the county by the end of the decade, of which at least 30% will be affordable.

Rent Butter: Aims to create a resident screening solution that offers valuable and unbiased insights to housing providers while expanding housing options for individuals with less-than-ideal credit histories.

Roam: Helps homebuyers purchase a home with a low-rate assumable mortgage. Buyers can use their platform to search listings with assumable mortgages, and Roam streamlines all steps in the assumption process, working with the mortgage servicer on behalf of buyer, seller and agents to ensure the transaction closes on time.

US Modular Capital: A lender exclusively dedicated to financing volumetric construction by providing developers with flexible and innovative financing solutions required for volumetric projects.

Public Policy and Regulatory Reform

City of Detroit: Land Value Tax Plan: Detroit is proposing a Land Value Tax plan, which would provide long-overdue relief to homeowners by reducing property taxes while encouraging growth and reinvestment; the plan shifts the tax burden from property improvements and buildings to land.

City of San Diego: ADU Bonus program: The City of San Diego has implemented a Bonus Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) Program that allows for increased density for Affordable ADUs. This incentive has led to the construction of deed restricted ADUs and naturally affordable ADUs throughout the City.

Compass Working Capital: Ppartners with families with low incomes, primarily led by Black and/or Latina women, to build savings and assets as a pathway out of poverty. Has developed and implemented a series of innovations to expand the scope and impact of the Family Self-Sufficiency program, the nation’s largest wealth-building program for families with low incomes, made available in HUD-assisted housing.

First Repair: A local-to-national approach in the movement for Black reparations where localities nationwide, like Evanston, IL, are prioritizing housing-related redress as a first tangible step to repair the legacies of slavery in the United States.

FwdSlash: Enables communities to guide the healthcare investment of the novel contracts with managed Medicaid that generates up to $30 billion annually in health cost savings at scale to increase housing supply and services for people experiencing housing insecurity and homelessness.

Placemate: Helps tourism-based communities unlock new affordable rental housing for the local workforce  through their public-private partnerships that have designed and implemented incentive programs to convert underutilized housing stock into new long-term rentals.

Pronto Housing: Streamlines affordable housing resident qualification so property teams can fill units faster and improve the resident experience through their software that is configurable for any affordable program to reflect the myriad of regulatory agencies and financing permutations for properties across the US.

Congrats to all those selected!