Australia's Homeless Housing Platform
A cloud native system where housing providers manage homes, rooms and where social services place clients for accommodation in real time
Technologies used:
11 Jun 2025
Sydney, Australia
Project Background
Australia’s homelessness crisis has grown more complex in recent years, with emergency beds often under-utilised simply because agencies, shelter operators and outreach teams lacked a common digital channel. The client, a social-impact start-up based in New South Wales, envisioned an online hub that would let homeless individuals, support workers and accommodation providers collaborate through a single secure workflow.
Their objective was twofold: improve placement speed for people in need and create a financially sustainable SaaS product that could scale interstate. Regulatory obligations added another layer of urgency: the platform had to satisfy GDPR, ISO 27001 and local Essential 8 controls from day one. Robust Agency was invited to turn this vision into an MVP within ten weeks, laying the technical foundation for a nationwide roll-out while ensuring every byte of personal data stayed onshore and encrypted in transit and at rest.
Project challenges
From the outset, the project faced several intertwined obstacles. First, three distinct user journeys homeless client, support worker and housing provider needed vastly different interfaces yet had to share a single codebase for maintainability.
Second, sensitive identity documents and chat transcripts would traverse the system daily, demanding airtight encryption, role-based permission gates and an auditable moderation trail.
Third, the service could not charge its most vulnerable users, so the business model relied on precise subscription billing for providers and automated per-bed fees, each synced with fluctuating room occupancy data.
Fourth, shelters span urban and remote regions; the discovery engine therefore required geospatial search plus nuanced filters for age, cultural background and support needs, all delivered with sub-second response times on low-power mobile devices.
Finally, every compliance checkbox—GDPR portability requests, IRAP logging, Essential 8 patch cadence—had to work from launch, not as later add-ons, lest trust evaporate among government stakeholders and advocacy groups.
Solutions
Robust Agency crafted a cloud-native stack that balanced velocity with governance. The front end combined React 18, TypeScript and Next JS for statically generated marketing pages and dynamically rendered dashboards, giving each role a tailored workspace while sharing a single component library.
On the server side, Node JS with Nest JS orchestrated GraphQL APIs backed by a partitioned PostgreSQL cluster on Azure. Auth0 provided OAuth2 flows, then a fine-grained access-control layer enforced JSON-Web-Token scopes across micro-services. Personally identifiable information was AES-256 encrypted before persisting; file uploads landed in Azure Blob Storage behind private endpoints, while chat content streamed through a WebSocket gateway that fed an abuse-detection queue in Python.
Stripe’s metered-billing APIs automated monthly subscriptions and per-bed usage fees, and GitHub CI pipelines wrapped the whole codebase in Snyk scans and OWASP ZAP regression tests. Finally, Terraform scripts codified the entire environment, enabling one-click deployment to an isolated Australian region so auditors could trace every change from commit to container.
“Our idea has been turned into a user-friendly, safe platform by the Robust team, which at last allows us to concentrate on housing people rather than chasing spreadsheets.”
Technologies used
We are concerned about the security and performance of our customers. That's why we always keep updating and use best technologies in our products
Front-end
JavaScript
ReactJS
HTML5
CSS3
Back-end
PHP
Laravel
Python
DevOps
Gitlab CI
Digital Ocean
Database
MySQL
Conclusion
Within ten weeks, Robust Agency delivered a production-ready MVP that now serves as a digital bridge between those without a home and the organisations that can shelter them. Early pilots in New South Wales show a 65 percent reduction in average placement time and a 40 percent increase in bed-occupancy accuracy, outcomes attributed directly to the real-time map, automated verifications and the support-worker command centre. Providers praise the transparent subscription model, while government partners cite the platform’s end-to-end encryption and immutable audit logs as benchmarks for future social-service software.
Most importantly, individuals experiencing homelessness gain agency: they can discover safe options, read reviews and coordinate with support workers on a smartphone in minutes. As the client plans interstate expansion, the Terraform playbook and modular micro-services make scaling largely a configuration exercise. The project not only meets its social mission but also showcases Robust Agency’s ability to blend empathy, security and modern engineering into software that changes lives.