The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) is planning to examine innovations in the multifamily housing space following its TechSprint event in late July, which focused on innovative use cases in housing for generative artificial intelligence (gen AI). 

“There’s a lot of innovation taking place in the multifamily space. There’s at least a desire for more innovation in that space,” said Anne Marie Pippin, deputy director of the FHFA’s Division of Conservatorship Oversight and Readiness. “We’re starting conversations right now internally with our multifamily team within FHFA about what to think about for areas of focus for us.”

Pippin spoke on stage during HousingWire’s IMB Summit held in Dallas on Tuesday.

The FHFA TechSprint culminated with a demo day, during which 12 teams presented their solutions to a panel of technology, regulatory and housing experts. The teams provided a road map for enterprising companies looking to harness gen AI, with use cases focused on consumer experience, assessing creditworthiness, operations and risk management, and compliance.

Four teams focused on innovations in multifamily, including fraud detection and tools to drive new capital to the space. 

According to Pippin, as far as the “technical pieces of generative AI,” the FHFA wants to focus on “some tools called RAG models.” The retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) technique enhances gen AI models with facts fetched from external sources.

“A lot of the teams pointed toward retrieval-augmented generation and the need to use that type of tool, technique, with an overlay of a large language model, so that you’re pulling from sources of data that are the most applicable to the problems that you’re trying to solve,” Pippin said. “It was really eye-opening for us to see how many teams were pointing toward the RAG model. So, we’re going to be sort of diving into that a little bit more as well.”

The FHFA launched its Office of Financial Technology in July 2022. The office serves as a centralized source of information to support the regulator in addressing emerging risks and advancing priorities related to the adoption and deployment of financial technology. In April, the regulator announced Tracy Stephan’s appointment as its chief artificial intelligence officer.