In most communities, landlord engagement starts and ends with whoever picked up the phone last. Housing navigators build small, personal networks. Staff turnover erases those relationships. And when a new client needs housing, the search starts from scratch. Partnership Home — the collaborative applicant, HMIS lead, and coordinated entry lead for the TX-601 Continuum of Care in Tarrant County, Texas — recognized this as a system design problem. Their answer was centralized landlord engagement: a shared model where property relationships become system assets instead of individual ones. This is how they built it, and what changed when they did.

Our first Unlocked story takes us to Texas, where Partnership Home has transformed landlord engagement with Padmission Connect.

Prior to centralization, landlord engagement in Tarrant County operated through informal networks and agency-specific relationships. Housing navigators often relied on personal knowledge of available units, creating uneven access across programs and populations.

Partnership Home sought to create shared visibility into rental opportunities without removing agency autonomy or changing how housing decisions were made.

Spotlight on Partnership Home

Partnership Home serves as the collaborative applicant, HMIS, and Coordinated Entry lead for the TX-601 Continuum of Care. Their mission: build strong partnerships, lead with innovation, and act as a catalyst for community transformation.

We spoke with their Director of Housing and landlord engagement expert, Kimberly Doty, about how Padmission Connect has changed the way their team collaborates, engages landlords, and helps clients find a place to call home.

Centralizing Landlord Engagement

With centralized property engagement in place, landlords were no longer tied to a single program or navigator. At the same time, staff retained discretion over placements, eligibility, and participant support—decisions remained human-led, while access to information became system-owned.

Before using Padmission Connect, landlord engagement and housing navigation at Partnership Home was siloed. Staff often held onto “secret landlords” they had developed relationships with, which limited collaboration.

That’s changed dramatically.

“After about 6 months of showing up for our Case Management staff and showing them how we can ADD value to their already formed landlord relationships, our frontline staff now even bring us landlords they have found for the entire community to access.”

By shifting to a centralized property engagement model, Partnership Home has created a culture where landlord relationships are shared, not siloed. This ensures more equitable access to housing opportunities for all participants.

The team uses Padmission Connect daily to keep track of properties, landlord communication, and available units.

“Padmission has given our team a way to centralize our knowledge. We can pick up where someone else has left off in connecting with a property. Padmission’s different features help us ensure we are engaging with all our partners and have easy access to our unit inventory.”

Their most frequently used features for coordinated housing search include:

• • Map-Based Search – to help clients quickly identify properties near work, school, or other important locations.
  • Unit Reservations – to hold units for participants with substantial housing barriers.
  • Lease-Up Tracking – to connect high-impact programs to successful placements.

“Recently, our most used have been the reservations that allow us to keep inventory of the units that are allocated to our client demographic, even if the property isn’t partnered. We are also able to connect our specific high-impact program to our lease-ups and keep track of our leased units.”

Lessons in Building Landlord Trust

Partnership Home’s success has come from more than just technology—it’s also about people.

“It is crucial to stay front facing with landlords to build a strong foundation of trust. This helps prevent eviction for the clients and builds trust with the landlord to come to you in times of need.”

By using Padmission Connect alongside personal landlord relationships, Partnership Home has built a reliable system for both property owners and participants.

Bringing it Home

One client story stands out.

“Through the map feature, (a client completely new to the area) found a place that wasn’t far from her future employer. She was able to call them and schedule her tour right in front of me which ultimately ended with her living at that property. We’ve had so many clients find a place to call home via Padmission.”

Stories like this showcase how Padmission Connect not only supports case managers and landlords, but also empowers clients to make housing choices that fit their lives.

Advice for Other Communities

When asked what advice they’d share with others considering Padmission Connect, Partnership Home emphasized landlord excitement and data insights:

“My advice would be to really get your landlord partners excited about using Padmission. From what we’ve seen, those who are invested in updating consistently and posting specials on their pages have seen increased interest from both clients who are excited about their program and case managers who are looking to house someone. Also, keep an eye on the data you get from it. I like being able to see which of our partner agencies have high utilization and which agencies might need some more help navigating the system.”

Partnership Home’s experience reflects a pattern visible across communities that have made this structural shift. Read how Cincinnati’s RentConnect centralized housing navigation across 30 partner organizations, and how Indianapolis’s HomeNow Indy built a dedicated Housing Acquisition team to serve the entire CoC.

For the operational design behind centralized landlord engagement for CoCs — including how communities structure shared access before launching — that guide covers the architecture in full. For a closer look at how unit reservation coordination supports housing placement pipelines across agencies, that detail is covered separately.

And for the broader picture of how system fragmentation in homelessness response shapes what communities can accomplish, that framing connects directly to what Partnership Home set out to solve.