Screening an applicant

How Aptoria screens a rental applicant, why the agent prepares the file but you make the approval decision, and why a denial is always yours.

You run screening with your screening provider; Aptoria records the provider’s facts — credit, background, and income or rent-to-income signals — against the criteria you set, for your decision. You set the criteria that matter to you up front, applied the same way to every applicant, which is both good practice and what fair-housing law expects.

Applying the same criteria to everyone is not cosmetic; it is how you stay on the right side of federal Fair Housing rules. Aptoria runs the same check the same way for each applicant, so your decisions rest on the criteria you set, not on anything you are not permitted to consider.

A complete application is presented to you with the provider’s facts lined up against your stated criteria, organized so you can decide. The agent prepares the file so a clean, qualified application takes minutes to review — but it does not approve anyone on its own.

A denial is different, and this is deliberate. Denying an applicant is on the blocked floor — it can never run autonomously. Federal law, the Fair Credit Reporting Act, requires a human decision plus a proper adverse-action notice whenever a tenant-screening report factors into turning someone down. The agent surfaces a borderline or failing application for your review, but the decision to deny, and the notice that has to follow, stays with you.

When you decline an applicant based in whole or in part on a screening report, federal law requires an adverse-action notice: it tells the applicant the decision was informed by a report, identifies the reporting agency, and explains their right to dispute the information and get a free copy. Aptoria keeps this a guided, human-confirmed step rather than an automatic send, so the notice goes out correctly and the decision is attributable to you.

Every screening decision, and the notice that follows a denial, is captured in your audit trail. That is what lets you show a decision was made on your stated criteria if it is ever questioned.