How does tenant screening work?

Choose Tenant screening under Property management. It holds the applications for the homes you manage, the checks your agency carried out, and the decision you recorded.

Read this first: the checks are yours, not ours

Housing Market runs no check on anybody. There is no credit bureau, no background-check company, no identity-verification service, no sanctions or eviction search, and no credit score anywhere in this feature — not switched off, not planned for a later plan, not there. Every outcome on the screen is one your agency established by its own means and then wrote down.

This is said first because "tenant screening" means a bought report in most products that offer it, and a reader who is not told will assume a report arrives. What this screen gives you is one place where the referencing you already do is recorded against the application it belongs to, with the decision beside it and both kept.

Taking an application

• Choose Take an application.
• Choose the Unit and the Applicant. The applicant is one of your own contacts.
• Give the date they want to move in, if you know it.

The application points at your address book rather than making a second copy of the person. Nothing in this feature stores a date of birth, an identity-document number, a bank account, a salary figure or an employer's name — what you concluded about income or employment is one word and whatever note you chose to write.

Recording a check

Record a check holds six kinds — Identity, Employment, Income, Previous landlord, Affordability and Other — and each takes one of four outcomes: Satisfied, Not satisfied, Still open, or No answer received.

No answer received is a real outcome rather than a polite way of saying no. A previous landlord who never replies has told you nothing bad, and recording that as a failure would turn somebody else's silence into a mark against the applicant.

One check is kept per kind. Recording the same kind again replaces the outcome and records that it was you who made the current claim, and the earlier outcome stays in the audit trail. There is no score, no overall pass or fail, no ranking of applicants and no recommendation: the decision is entirely yours.

The decision, and correcting it

Record the decision takes Approved, Declined or Withdrawn by the applicant, with a reason. Once a decision exists, the check form closes and the heading becomes Correct the decision: recording a different one puts a correction beside the first and removes nothing. There is no way back to undecided.

The audit trail records the unit, the decision and who made it. It deliberately does not record the reason you typed or the applicant's name.

What is not here

• No form, link or email for the applicant. There is no applicant-facing anything: your office types what it found.
• No document upload on this screen. Supporting documents are listed by name, and they are attached through the CRM's own files rather than from here.
• No fee. Screening adds no charge of its own — it is part of the property-management module.
• No filter by unit or by status yet. The screen toggles between active and archived applications.
• No button that turns an approved application into a tenancy. Record the tenancy on the Tenancies screen.

Nothing is deleted. Archiving an application keeps every check, the decision, and who made it.