Identifying quality residents will keep your long-term costs low. Low occupancy rates in the current Canadian rental market allow property managers to focus on selecting the most desirable residents for their vacancies. It is important, however, to make quality selections quickly before those ideal prospects sign a lease elsewhere! Explore how technology can help you efficiently sign leases with the right residents. Know your applicants Basic credit checks aren’t enough to get to know prospective renters. Add a range of inquiries to screening process to give you deeper insights that help mitigate risk—without slowing down the process. “A more robust screening process doesn’t have to be time consuming. Online, automated applicant screening improves speed, data access, and accuracy. Your screening software should integrate with your property management platform for full transparency,” suggests Peter Altobelli, vice president and general manager of Yardi Canada. Screen confidently Regardless of income, prospective renters need to be held to the same screening standards. Equifax credit data, criminal and court records, fraud checks, employment and rental histories are all important sources of information to properly evaluate an applicant. “Consider adding Certn as well to your screening process as well. Certn is the world’s largest risk relevant database, uses data from thousands of publicly available records and incorporates artificial intelligence and machine learning to evaluate prospects,” Altobelli says. Certn data includes high-risk behaviors, criminal and court records from 240 countries, 350 Canadian court boards and tribunals, adverse media, eviction records, watch lists and social media profiles. Understand the benefits  Advanced screening technology that analyzes a range of reliable data can help you consistently choose quality residents. When that technology integrates with your leasing and accounting platform, it brings additional benefits. “An integrated screening solution compares your screening process with the overall...

For multifamily property managers, flipping a coin to decide whether or not to rent to a prospect with thin or no credit information can hardly be considered an industry best practice. But with 27 to 30 million potential apartment renters who can’t be evaluated for a traditional credit score, usually due to lack of recent credit history or absence of any credit data at all,  having some way to assess the “unscoreable population” is becoming increasingly important. As national economic recovery continues in the post-recession period, economists are talking a lot about the concept of “household formation.” It’s essentially the unbundling or decoupling of shared housing situations, which became increasingly common during the most recent lean years. Historically, 1.1 million new households are formed every year in the United States. Current figures are still lagging behind that average, with just 746,000 households formed in the last year. But as job growth continues and young renters are able to earn better wages, household formations are expected to pick up. “Things have improved, they’ve found a job or gotten a better job, and they’re ready go out and find an apartment of their own. But without recent credit history, in most resident screening models they will come back as unscoreable, basically a ghost. Then the landlord finds themselves making a qualitative decision to determine what they want to do with that person,” explained Patrick Hennessey, vice president of Resident Screening for Yardi. It’s a dilemma that could put property leasing agents and managers in a tough spot. But additional options for credit screening, including a new solution being offered by Yardi Resident Screening, can address this pain point head on. In addition to a tried and tested proprietary scoring formula, Resident Screening users now have the...