Rent and arrears management for First Nations housing

Rent set by a model, not by hand

When rents are set one at a time, two families in the same kind of house can end up paying very different amounts, and nobody can say why. Nation Pathways sets rent from a model your nation controls:

• a CMHC market-rent baseline,
• income-assistance shelter rates,
• an age-based adjustment schedule that your nation versions and dates.

New rates apply at turnover only, so sitting tenants are never repriced out of the blue. Every rent keeps a record of the schedule it came from, so the question “why is my rent this amount?” has an answer on file.

The ledger, without the spreadsheet

Rent, arrears, payment arrangements, collections, loans, invoices and utility charges live in one ledger per tenant, reconciled in the same system the housing team uses for everything else. Finance staff and housing staff look at the same numbers.

Statements, invoices and receipts go out as clean PDFs, emailed straight to the tenant. Occupancy agreements — fixed-term, month-to-month and commercial — are generated from the same records.

Arrears handled by your policy

Arrears are where inconsistency hurts most. Nation Pathways applies your nation’s arrears policy the same way for everyone:

• repayment minimums and the protected window,
• review cadence and notice periods,
• the preconditions that must be met before eviction.

Each rule cites the clause of your policy it comes from, and the whole chain — arrangements, notices, reviews — is on file. An exception is an Executive Director’s override, recorded in the audit log with who made it and when.

Bring your existing arrears with you

You don’t start from zero. Outstanding arrears import straight from your current system’s ledger as part of setup, and built-in cleanup tools surface the duplicate files, mismatched addresses and half-finished records every migration turns up. Anything outside the setup scope, such as unusually large or messy historical data, is quoted in writing before any work starts.

Clear numbers for leadership

Chief & Council get a read-only Reports dashboard of housing KPIs, and the underlying data never leaves the nation. Tenants’ financial information sits in your nation’s own isolated database, hosted in Canada, and is never sold, shared or used to train anything.