Advocating for Accessibility

Link Wentworth’s Affordable Housing Lead Matthew Jackson led a campaign which has resulted in significant support for accessible housing seekers.

For more than ten months, Matthew has been working with product, design and user experience teams at real estate website realestate.com, advocating for search functions that enable people who are looking for affordable and accessible housing.

Previously, there has been no search function that allows home seekers to sort search results and filter for accessible amenities – such as wide doorways and suitably fitted bathrooms.

While his advocacy to achieve a similar outcome for affordable house listings continues, Matthew is delighted with this outcome, saying:

“Prior to this, an accessible category did not exist. There were no options for someone searching for accessible home features.

“I engaged the expertise and feedback of my colleagues Charlie Souma from Echo Realty and Anastasiya Kozak from Home Ground Reality in the process. Consequently, I am thrilled to announce that realestate.com today launched a new search category, ‘Accessibility Features’, which allows listings to detail what amenities the home has, and home seekers to search for specific features.

“We will continue to work with realestate.com teams, to expand these options and to include an affordable housing search category. But for now, Australia’s market-leading property platform has taken a meaningful step that helps clients who are looking for specific features, which makes their search more equitable and their options easier to find.”

Matthew continues working with realestate.com to create an ‘affordable housing’ search function. This will direct anyone seeking affordable rental housing to all the available stock, not just from Link Wentworth, but from all CHPs nationally.

Link Wentworth is proud of the work Matthew does and what his tireless advocacy has achieved.