Beyond Credit Checks

Patrick Hennessey, Yardi

By Erica Rascón on Nov 9, 2016 in People

Patrick Hennessey, Vice President and General Manager at Yardi, joined the team in 2010 as an expert in screening software. He found Yardi’s small company feel and large company resources appealing. 

“We have a great team of people, cutting edge technology, and the efficiencies that a company the size of Yardi are able to attain with support teams on both coasts and flexible hours for our clients,” says Hennessey.

Hennessey leads the Yardi Resident Screening team in honing and refining online screening software for multifamily clients. The team introduced the product to Canadian markets earlier this year.

Benefits of Yardi Resident Screening

Hennessey’s focus, Yardi Resident Screening, helps leasing agents select and retain low-risk residents. The system facilitates:

• comprehensive reports
• reliable data
• automated recommendations
• insights into applicant traffic
• applicant and resident performance reporting
• improved efficiencies

Hennessey explains, “We do a few key things to help our clients through Resident Screening. First, we help our clients make the best possible leasing decisions. We do that by helping them find more high quality applicants and fewer low quality applicants. Thus we help them maximize revenue by minimizing unwarranted financial risks.”

He continues, “Additionally, we limit their legal exposure by using a neutral third party for their screening process. That ensure that the applicants’ rights are protected and that they are given a fair opportunity in the leasing process.”

In addition to increased consistency in the selection process of their residents, property managers who adopt Yardi Resident Screening can expect cost savings as a result of improved efficiencies in the leasing office. Rather than requesting a credit report and scoring it by hand, users execute tasks online.

Added Security

The efficiency and convenience of online leasing has directly influenced the demand for resident screening tools. With Resident Screening, the online processes are now more secure.

“Fraud, and trying to help clients reduce fraud, is a big topic at the moment. Today, people can apply online from anywhere in the world potentially go through the leasing process without the property manager ever having a sense of who they are working with. Yardi Resident Screening offers tools to help limit the amount of fraud that people can get away with,” says Hennessey.

Improved Metrics, Smarter Forecasting

Resident Screening is equipped with the Executive Dashboard that offers concise performance metrics.

Hennessey elaborates, “The real value that we bring to the table is our Executive Dashboard that is built right into Voyager. Through our dashboard, property managers and executives can benchmark from one property to another property and know how they’re doing in terms of approval rates and rejection rates. They can evaluate marketing sources to see where the best and the worst applicants are coming from in terms of web sources — and compare screening results with financial performance.”

Resident Screening users can adjust their screening criteria to countless what-if scenarios via the Criteria Sandbox. As market conditions or vacancy rates change at the property, leasing specialists use this tool to determine the adjustments needed to get the desired changes to their acceptance rate.

“Up till now, someone would manually do the math and rescore their applicants. But we’ve created a scoring simulator where we can configure their criteria to any possible combination and illustrate how a certain set of tweaks will increase or decrease their rejection or decline rate,” says Hennessey.

Data gathered by Resident Screening also furnishes leasing agents with insights into renter behavior that may affect marketing decisions.

Hennessey explains, “Yardi Resident Screening empowers clients to learn more about their properties. Many of our clients have a number of properties in a certain market, in a certain neighborhood, in some cases, directly across the street from each other. Often times, those properties have very different demographics even when they are comparably priced with similar amenities. We are able to help our clients drill into: Where are the people coming from between one property and another? How can we help them find the highest quality applicants for all of their properties?”

The software collects the marketing source of each applicant that goes through the screening process. It then analyzes those sources to see which produced the highest and lowest quality residents.

Hennessey says, “[Clients] can use that information to work with their marketing partners and identify more of their high quality applicants through their marketing processes.”

Beyond the Leasing Office

Yardi Resident Screening is one product with countless advantages. Hennessey takes pride in the benefits that the product provides to clients and society at large.

“Being in the screening industry, I think we play a significant role in society by ensuring that consumers get an unbiased, non-discriminatory shot at living in the housing they want, while also helping to provide a safe environment for those people, their families, and the employees of our clients.”

To learn more about Yardi Resident Screening in the United States, click here. Canadian users may explore here.