About

About Unit Seeker

Unit Seeker is a free, independent directory that helps renters find Section 8 and other HUD-assisted multifamily rental properties across the United States. We exist for one reason: government affordable-housing information is scattered across dozens of agencies, datasets, and PDF lists, and the people who need it most often have the least time and bandwidth to dig for it.

This site pulls publicly available data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and republishes it in a fast, mobile-friendly, and easy-to-search format — organized the way renters actually think about housing: by state, then by city, then by property. We are not a housing authority. We do not own or manage any of the properties listed here. We do not collect applications. Our job is to surface real options and explain how they work in plain English.

Where our data comes from

Property listings are sourced from HUD's public Multifamily Properties - Assisted dataset, a Feature Service hosted on HUD's ArcGIS open-data platform (services.arcgis.com/VTyQ9soqVukalItT/.../Multifamily_Properties_Assisted/FeatureServer), which inventories properties participating in HUD's Project-Based Section 8, Section 202 (Supportive Housing for the Elderly), Section 811 (Supportive Housing for Persons with Disabilities), and other federally-subsidized rental programs. The dataset is a U.S. federal government work (public domain) with a standard no-warranty disclaimer and no login, key, or usage restriction — it is fetched directly, live, with no license ambiguity. Each listing on this site corresponds to a real entry in that dataset, keyed on HUD's own PROPERTY_ID field, including the property's address, on-site phone number, total assisted unit count, HUD category and program code, management-agent organization name, the client group it serves, and (where on file) its most recent HUD REAC physical inspection score.

How the directory is built (pipeline & methodology)

Unit Seeker was originally built from a snapshot of 4,932 properties. As of 2026-09-11 the dataset was re-pulled in full (paginated, 2,000 records per page, ordered by OBJECTID, verified against a returnCountOnly query) to 23,783 live records, and the site was refreshed as follows:

• Join method: each of the 4,932 existing profile pages was matched to a live HUD record by exact, normalized street address + ZIP5 (uppercased, punctuation-stripped). Where that produced zero candidates, a fallback exact match on normalized property name + city + state + ZIP5 was tried. We do not join on name alone. Result: 4834 pages matched exactly one live record and were refreshed with live field values; 97 pages could not be pinned to a single live record with confidence — either because more than one live record shares that address (e.g. multi-phase developments), or because more than one of our existing pages independently matched the same single live record — and were left completely untouched rather than guessed; 1 page could not be confidently re-matched by either method and now carries an on-page notice rather than an assumption that the property closed.
• New pages: per the >5,000-record rule, we did not create individual profile pages for the ~18,800 properties in HUD's live data beyond the original 4,932. Instead, every state and city now has a paginated browse table (200 rows/page) covering all in-scope live properties, with a linked name where a Unit Seeker profile page exists and plain text where it does not.
• Scope note: 20 of HUD's 23,783 live records have no city/state on file, or are located in Guam or the Northern Mariana Islands, which fall outside this site's existing state/city directory structure; they are counted in the national total above but are not shown on any state or city browse page.

Fields rendered and withheld (license & PII policy)

HUD's Multifamily Properties - Assisted dataset is a U.S. federal government work (public domain). Per PII-POLICY v2 (Amendment v2, 2026-09-11, owner decision E10 for this dataset), which allows institutional/facility datasets published by a government agency to render the facility's own street address and public phone number, we render the facility's own street address and public on-site phone number exactly as HUD records them — this is a business/institutional location, not a private individual's home. We do not render, and HUD's own schema for this dataset does not include, any record keyed to a named individual. Fields rendered: property name, street address, city/state/ZIP, total and assisted unit counts, HUD category and program code, management-agent organization name, client group served, on-site phone (where recorded), and REAC inspection score/date (where on file). Fields withheld: none of this dataset's fields identify a private individual; we do not geocode, enrich, or infer any field beyond what HUD publishes.

What we do not list

This directory focuses on HUD-assisted multifamily rental properties. It does not include private market rentals, Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) properties unless they overlap with HUD subsidies, public housing developments operated by Public Housing Agencies (PHAs), or single-family voucher rentals. For Housing Choice Vouchers (the program most people mean by "Section 8"), see our guide to applying for a voucher.

How we make money

Unit Seeker is supported by display advertising shown alongside content. We do not charge renters, do not sell leads, and do not accept payment from property owners or managers in exchange for placement, ranking, or visibility in the directory. Listings are presented in the order returned by the underlying HUD data — typically alphabetical within a city or state — and that ordering is not for sale.

Corrections & takedown requests

Spot a listing that looks wrong, duplicated, or out of date? Use our contact page to send: the page URL, the field you believe is wrong, what you believe the correct value is, and (if you have one) a source. We read every message and re-check against HUD's dataset before updating a listing.