Letter from the Executive Director for February 2025: Building What the Market Won’t

In January we continued laying track for where we want to go with monthly dues and our management information systems. We heard back about a grant application for Mass Save. Finally, we also drafted and filed a fire safety bill. I will talk mostly about our software in this edition because many have experienced site slowdowns and other issues.

We continue to work on our website. At long last, we have allocated developer resources to identifying why it takes 15 seconds to load some pages. I suspect this will be due to third-party software. When we first started MassLandlords 10 years ago, we chose WordPress as our website framework. It’s still good overall. But the plugins we’ve relied on have not grown with us. And we’ve moved our WordPress site into a larger, more professional open-source framework. Suffice it to say, something is no longer working. We’ll find the slowdown and fix it soon.

We continue to work toward our implementation of monthly dues. I have also been spooling up separate software to manage our internal data. It is a difficult balancing act to get the right level of automation. We have a very small team, and I have professional software expertise, so I am doing the best I can for the organization. We always have to prioritize security, so it’s never a straight line to our goals. Software is very expensive, as well.

Mass Save offered the chance for us to build organizational capacity. This is why we applied to be a Mass Save Community First Partner with the cities of New Bedford and Fall River. They need landlords like us to represent the program to landlords who have yet to participate. We can move the needle on adoption because we know the sticking points. Unfortunately for us, our application was rejected. The reviewer wrote, “While the social justice aspect of this work was represented from the landlord perspective, the application scored low in its discussion of social justice for renters and other priority populations.” I would have thought that a landlord’s social justice impact on renters was obvious at this point. We’ll try again next time. Our apologies to the renters in these towns, who may be stuck with no insulation and bad heating a while longer.

Sometimes people agree with us. That is why our fire safety bill has successfully been filed in the state Senate: SD.912 “An Act preventing fires and secondhand smoke in non-smoking rental housing” is now ready for cosponsoring. We have a detailed call to action in this edition.

Please remember that we continue to run members-only office hours and in-person meetups, as well as record video content. You can find a whole bunch of personal interactions on our events and videos page.

Thank you for supporting our mission to create better rental housing. We've got your back only because you've got ours. Please join as a member, encourage others to join, become a property rights supporter or increase your level of support. We aim to hire both a full-time educator and policy advocate.

Sincerely,

Douglas Quattrochi

Executive Director

MassLandlords, Inc.