Analysis of massive volumes of data is burdensome and expensive, yet incredibly important to strategic decision making. Enter the index – an easy to understand alternative to analyzing raw source data. SP Group introduces our Neighborhood Distress Index (NDI). An index is way to condense multiple variables into just one indicator without losing depth. An index...more
Every month a myriad of research and articles are published regarding millennial spending habits and home buying. Recently, comments from a wealthy developer made waves in the news blaming the low home-ownership rates among millennials to their frivolous spending habits – including things like $19 Avocado toasts and $4 coffees. But we ask – is...more
Featured in National Mortgage News (see the article here) There are 39 counties included in the Hurricane Harvey Presidential Declared Disaster (PDD) Areas. While all of these counties were affected by the hurricane, the impact to property damage varied across neighborhoods within the counties. Some neighborhoods experienced a more significant destruction to properties than others....more
KHOU 11 Investigates teamed with SP Group on a segment identifying the impact on the Texas housing market should the National Flood Insurance Program lapse. We found nearly 216,000 homes in Texas sit in floodplains. Nearly half of those, or 105,000 homes, are in the greater Houston area. The clock is ticking toward a deadline that would...more
The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) allocated $5 billion in Community Development Block Grants Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) funds to the State of Texas for the purpose of assisting in long-term recovery from Hurricane Harvey. HUD requires that 80% of these funds, or $4 billion, must be expended in HUD-identified “most impacted and distressed areas”, which are the...more
Besides Hurricane Maria, only one other category 5 hurricane made landfall in Puerto Rico in over 150 years – the San Felipe Segundo that hit the island in 1928. In more recent history, Hurricane Georges, a category 3 storm, hit the island in 1998 causing significant destruction. In this Part 1 of our series on...more
Frail Housing Market Before Hurricane Maria Prior to Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico faced significant fiscal challenges, including high rates of debt, poverty, and unemployment coupled with a frail housing market. According to Puerto Rico’s Officer of the Commissioner of Financial Institutions, more than 5,700 homes were foreclosed in 2016, which is more than double the foreclosures from a...more
SP GROUP AWARDED GSA MULTIPLE AWARD SCHEDULE 00CORP PROFESSIONAL SERVICE SCHEDULE CONTRACT SP Group is proud to announce that we have been awarded a GSA Multiple Award Schedule (MAS) Professional Services Schedule (PSS) Contract by the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA). The contract allows for Federal customers to efficiently purchase a wide range of SP...more
SP Group has designed a best practices checklist for developing and evaluating funding dashboards for the Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) Program. On June 7, 2018, The House Committee on Financial Services approved the Reforming Disaster Recovery Act of 2018 (H.R. 4557), to permanently authorize the CDBG-DR Program. The bill included provisions designed to increase the efficiency,...more
SP Group is very proud to announce that, for the second year, we were a sponsor of the Association of Public Data Users (APDU) 2018 Annual Conference! We also organized and moderated the panel “Making Connections: Linking Data to Solve Public Problems“. Our panel was about how private and administrative data can supplement or enhance nationally collected public data. How are...more