As a property manager or rental property owner, you probably spend a lot of time qualifying each prospective tenant. You need to make sure they’re able to pay rent, that they don’t have a criminal background or other red flags (like poor credit), and that they’re a good fit on variables like pet ownership or smoking. Screening tenants is a challenge, and the stakes are high—poor screening could leave you facing a costly eviction.
The Advantages of Prequalifying Potential Renters: Tech-Driven Tenant Pre-Qualification in Your Tenant Screening Process
Technology makes tenant screening easier and saves time. Let’s take a look at how pre-qualification works, and where it fits in the tenant screening process.
How Does Tenant Pre-qualification Help?
- Standardize your process: With tenant lead software, you can share standardized screening questions with all potential renters. This ensures that you deliver a consistent experience to everyone.
- Uncover the things that matter: Quickly vet a prospective tenant for employment status, an employer reference, whether or not they have pets, move-in date and more—all without having to stop what you’re doing for a conversation.
- Prioritize tenant leads: With a tech-driven pre screen, you’ll know right away if a tenant lead is qualified or not. This lets you focus your energy only on qualified tenants—the ones most likely to be a good fit.
- Keep compliant: Standardizing your process is a big part of staying compliant with federal guidelines. But tech can help you do more. You can add custom questions to your pre-screening process to address local or regional regulations.
Where Does Pre-qualification Fit in the Tenant Screening Process?
Pre-qualification helps you right from the start of your tenant screening process—it’s how you get moving on the right foot. You’ll be able to speed up the entire screening process and save time. With pre-qualification, you’ll know right away if a prospective tenant is qualified, based on the things that matter most to you. You can then move into more in-depth screening with confidence that you’re spending your time on the right candidates.
- List & promote rental online
- Pre-qualify all tenant leads
- Schedule a viewing
- Collect rental application
- Keep other tenant leads engaged
- Verify employment
- Pull credit report & credit score
- Contact references
- Check eviction reports
- Run background check
- Sign lease agreement
- Collect security deposit
Where Does Tenant Turner Help?
Tenant Turner’s scheduling software helps you with steps 1-5 above. By getting much more efficient on the first half of your task list, you can move through the entire list more quickly, reducing the time that your real estate sits empty. If you find yourself stuck on the credit check or eviction history steps later on in the tenant screening process, you may want to consider RentPrep. They offer eviction and credit score screenings as well as reference checks and employment verification.
Now, let’s take a look at each of those early steps in a bit more detail to see how technology can save you time:
- List & promote your rental online: With Tenant Turner, you can easily publish your listing once and then syndicate it across multiple listing sites including Zillow, Trulia, Apartment List, Zumper and more, as well as your own website. And you can do this all automatically, without having to retype or copy/paste the information dozens of times!
- Pre-qualify all tenant leads: Tenant Turner uses standardized questions and offers the ability to add custom questions so you can screen tenants quickly and consistently. You’ll know immediately if a lead is qualified or not, based on your qualifiers. You can even set up automatic responses to tenant lead inquiries, ensuring that every single one gets answered fast—without interrupting you each time.
- Schedule a viewing: With Tenant Turner, each prospective tenant can book their own viewing appointment online. You’ll be notified when they schedule or if they don't confirm. Didn’t get a confirmation? You can reach out ahead of time or have us automatically cancel, reducing the risk of no-shows. Our online scheduler integrates with popular calendars such as Google and Outlook.
- Collect rental application: Sending your application has never been easier. Just use Tenant Turner to send a rental application link immediately after every showing. Reducing friction at every step of the leasing process keeps potential tenants happy and gets your rental filled fast.
- Keep other tenant leads engaged: Once you’ve got qualified applications, you can add other interested tenant leads to a waitlist. This keeps them engaged with your property portfolio, letting you promote future listings—or reach out to them if your first choice tenant doesn’t work out.
If you’re spending too much time manually qualifying each prospective tenant, then Tenant Turner is right for you. We’ve saved property management teams 10-15 hours per week, per person, while helping them find better quality tenants.
Are you ready to save that kind of time?
