The first, and most crucial step in the rental process for prospective tenants is, of course, the application. Just like applying for a mortgage to purchase, tenants in Ontario must apply to rent. Sifting through applications and determining a renter’s qualifications, making sure they’re a qualified, and trustworthy tenant, can be a real sticking point for property owners, and a major reason they decide to utilize the services of a property management company.
Conventional methods of assessing tenant rentability and verification often include a credit check. Diving deep into a potential tenant’s credit report, however, doesn’t always give a complete story of their financial health, and certainly doesn’t always determine how trustworthy they are in terms of paying their rent on time. Credit checks basically answer one question: does an applicant pay off his or her credit cards. That’s useful information, of course, but it doesn’t come close to telling the whole story. In fact, the majority of people who end up getting evicted for nonpayment of rent (about 70 per cent of all evictions in Canada) actually have average or above average credit scores.
That’s why a group of Belleville-based real estate and technology innovators created Rentify: a technology platform designed to help property owners and managers improve their ability to screen prospects and identify ideal tenants. Rentify uses an AI-driven approach that replaces credit checks with a comprehensive analysis of prospects’ overall financial picture that leverages bank data.
According to the Rentify website, credit checks alone miss 85% of data that property owners need to make informed decisions about prospective residents; the solution being, taking a look at a prospects actual financial health and background, rather than simply a score. Rentify links with bank data to create instant insight into the full picture of an applicant’s financial health to reduce the risk of non-payments and evictions. After an applicant enters their banking data into the application, Rentify breaks down their bank-verified information into an easy to read report.
This new approach to tenant verification is based on looking at bank balances, total income, overdraft history, past rent issues, and other factors.
Property owners can create a Rentify rental application, select their questions and criteria, and ask prospective renters to connect with their banking institutions to provide a detailed report called a Bank Check. This document contains the applicant’s bank balance, total income, employer information, overdraft frequency, rent payment issues, bill payment issues, and red flags such as past bankruptcies. Rentify verifications are paperless, cost half as much as credit checks, and can be done instantly, building instant trust between landlords and tenants by getting everything out in the open.
And because Rentify is, by its very nature, NOT a credit check, prospective tenants can rest easy, knowing that this will have absolutely zero effect on their credit score.
MARDA Management is honoured to be the case study for Rentify, as the very first onboarded company for the platform. We’ve been utilizing Rentify to help screen prospective tenants for our owners since October of this year, and greatly look forward to seeing how this system helps our clients confidently tenant their properties with qualified renters.
If you’re a property owner and are looking for a more comprehensive and reliable way to screen potential tenants, call MARDA Management today at 519-255-RENT, or email us at info@mardamanagement.com
