About The City Of Jacksonville:
The City of Jacksonville, Florida operates a wide range of housing and community development programs designed to expand access to homeownership and support neighborhood revitalization. Through its housing initiatives, the city administers thousands of loans tied to affordable housing programs, including down payment assistance and long-term affordability initiatives; with primary focus of attending to diversified citizens with diverse needs.
The City of Jacksonville manages a large portfolio of housing loans tied to programs such as down payment assistance, low-cost multifamily development financing, foreclosure prevention and owner-occupied rehabilitation projects. Many of these loans include unique repayment structures, such as forgivable loans; or long-term affordability restrictions, requiring careful monitoring and compliance.
To support these programs, the City of Jacksonville relies on The Mortgage Office as its sole centralized loan servicing platform. Today, the city uses TMO to manage over 10,000 housing-related loans, providing the operational infrastructure needed to track, monitor, and report on its affordable housing initiatives.
The Problem:
Administering public housing programs presents unique operational challenges. Unlike traditional lending environments, municipal housing initiatives often involve specialized loan structures designed to support long-term affordability goals rather than standard repayment schedules. Many of Jacksonville’s programs include forgivable loans, revolving loan funds with multiple layers of interest rates (preconstruction rate, completion rate), and affordability agreements tied to public funding requirements, all of which require careful monitoring and detailed reporting.
Before implementing The Mortgage Office, the City of Jacksonville relied on a legacy system that lacked the functionality needed to efficiently manage the complexity of these programs and multiple funding sources. The platform struggled to support key operational requirements such as tracking deferred or forgivable loans, generating amortization schedules for revolving loans, and producing reliable reports for auditors, citizens of the city of Jacksonville and program oversight.
Adebisi, the city’s program lead, described the urgency of moving to a modern platform:
“From an accounting point of view, this is what we need — a system that is organic and current. At least one that we can generate interest from, generate quick and fast information from, and that information is transferable to an Excel file.”
As the city’s housing initiatives expanded, staff needed a robust system to track loan reductions, maturity dates, meet satisfaction requirements; ensuring revolving loans payment schedules are tracked, and transferable to City’s accounting system; it’s a one stop process to transfer information for example monthly reconciliation of revolving loans to record long term receivable – loan statements are generated from TMO as backup for funding levels, and compliance obligations across thousands of loans. Without a centralized platform designed for loan servicing and compliance monitoring, maintaining accurate records and producing consistent reports would require significant manual effort and create challenges for long-term program oversight.
The Solution:
The City of Jacksonville implemented The Mortgage Office to serve as the core system for managing its housing loan programs. TMO provides the city with a flexible platform capable of tracking thousands of loans while supporting the specialized requirements of affordable housing lending.
TMO, supports multiple program structures used by the city, including forgivable loans, revolving loan funds, foreclosure intervention program and Land Use Restriction Agreements (LURA) that enforce long-term affordability requirements for properties developed with public funding. These agreements ensure that properties receiving subsidies remain affordable to households within specific income levels.
TMO also enables Jacksonville to automate many of its operational processes. The system generates amortization schedules, tracks loan reductions, produces payment coupons and account statements, and sets automated reminders for key milestones such as loan anniversaries and maturities and satisfactions. These are measurable milestones, time saved by staff by centralizing information on one platform, is opening the channel of robust workflow, city departments can maintain clear oversight of their housing programs, be audit ready while reducing administrative complexity.
Reflecting on the system’s role in day-to-day operations, Adebisi noted:
“The extent of TMO is very crucial to our daily operation.”
The Results:
The Mortgage Office has streamlined key administrative processes that previously required significant manual effort. Built-in reminders and tracking tools help staff monitor loan reductions, anniversaries, and maturity dates, ensuring important program milestones are captured and addressed on time. By centralizing loan information and related documentation—such as mortgages, promissory notes, and amortization tables—directly within each loan record, the platform has reduced operational effort by approximately 20%. This enables the City to generate monthly loan reduction reports, research loans, produce maturity reports, and respond to citizens’ questions with the necessary information readily available. Annual occupancy reporting is also supported, helping teams verify residency requirements and maintain compliance with affordability programs tied to public funding.
Reporting has been particularly impactful for audit and compliance workflows. As Adebisi described:
“The reporting is great. We can download reports from TMO, send it straight to Excel for auditors to pick and choose whatever they want.”
In addition, staff can quickly export loan data for analysis, auditing, and regulatory reporting—improving transparency and simplifying oversight.
Next: Jacksonville’s vision for continued modernization
- TMO as a trailblazer partner in ongoing program modernization
- Earlier intake-to-servicing alignment, so application data can be leveraged in TMO sooner
- Stronger IDIS workflow alignment to reduce duplicate entry and improve efficiency
Looking ahead, Jacksonville sees an opportunity to streamline operations further by reducing duplicate data entry between Neighborly intake, Finance disbursement, loan boarding and servicing in TMO, and IDIS activity reporting. The goal is to fully automate the process in TMO, so validated application information securely flows across teams with the appropriate permissions and controls.
With centralized servicing, automated reminders, and structured reporting, Jacksonville is well positioned to remain audit-ready and operate efficiently at scale. This continued focus on workflow optimization will help expand affordable housing impact across the community.