We’ve seen a lot of conversations this year around pre-screening prospects before they tour and screening them before they sign a lease.  Quarterly reports from other leasing automation platforms have started to outline common pre-screening questions, while Peter Lohmann and Todd Ortscheid recently sent newsletters (and had a public discussion on LinkedIn) centered around screening tenants.

We can’t speak to how screening criteria reflects the quality of a tenant, but we can speak to how pre-screening prospects before they tour your property affects your leasing metrics and what the nationwide “norms” look like.

How are PMs managing pre-screening?

Over the past four months, we analyzed pre-screening practices across our nationwide property management network. Our research focused on understanding the common pre-screening criteria, the questions most frequently asked, and how these initial filters impact subsequent leasing workflows.

We’ve found that 65% of our PMs always pre-screen their prospects, while 11% never pre-screen their prospects.  Of the PMs who are pre-screening, at least sometimes, 82% utilize a single, standardized pre-screening template with occasional one-off criteria used for specific properties. This suggests that most property managers operate with uniform portfolios and can manage their pre-screening philosophies at the business level, as opposed to the adjusting individually for each property.

What’s the purpose of pre-screening?

We didn’t find a statistically significant difference in days on market for any of the criteria evaluated.  While some rarely used criteria changed the DOM by a few days, it’s safe to assume these were already outlier properties.

Of prospects that were pre-screened, 24% were disqualified and didn’t schedule a tour.  This is a significant number, whether it’s freeing up your team’s resources or simply freeing up the available tour times for the property, pre-screening is serving an important purpose.

Conclusion: Pre-screening efficiently filters out unqualified prospects, saving property managers time and preserving tour availability for high-potential renters.

What are the norms?

Let’s break down the individual questions PMs are asking prospects before they tour a property.  We’ll break this down by PM, not by property, to make sure larger PMs don’t have an outsized affect on the data.

When looking at these charts, remember that we’re using data from all PMs, so there is already a subset of 35% of PMs who aren’t pre-screening at all.

Pets

Pet policy is one of the most popular pre-screening criteria. The consensus is clear: pets should be allowed. While discussions continue around pet fees in the lease itself, the expectation is that properties welcome pets, and our data reflects this trend.

We found that most PMs include pet owners in their pre-screening process. In fact, 93.7% of PMs either allow pets outright, evaluate them case-by-case, or don't screen on this criteria at all.

Smoking

We found an almost even split between PMs who disqualify smokers before they tour and those who don't pre-screen on this criterion. Note that this data only reflects pre-screening, we can't comment on final screening or lease terms.

Looking at leasing metrics, the pre-screening choice here doesn’t have a large effect on the days on market for properties.  In the data we looked at, those that explicitly asked prospects if they smoked and disqualified them from touring if they did actually spent 1.68 days less on the market on average.

Eviction History

Now we get into the more heavily discussed screening criteria, and if they are a good way to evaluate tenants.  Remember, though, that we’re still talking about pre-screening with the purpose of removing unqualified prospects from the leasing funnel.

When it comes to eviction history, we see that 51% of PMs choose not to screen for this or simply allow everyone to move forward.  Meanwhile, those that actually pre-screen for this criteria typically disallow evictions altogether.

Credit Score

At this stage, asking about the prospect’s credit score is simply a question and answer, this is not a formal credit check.  Again, we see most PMs choosing not to screen on this criteria at all.  Those that do are typically looking for a score of 600+ or 650+.

Income-to-Rent Ratio

When it comes to the income ratio, we see a bit of a wider distribution.  While 51% aren’t screening at all, the remaining PMs are split pretty evenly between 2x, 2.5x, and 3x.

Custom Questions

Showdigs allows PMs to create their own pre-screening criteria with fully customizable questions and response options. This ensures they target the right prospects. We found that 13% of our PMs use this feature.

Most custom questions focus on PM-specific policies or procedures, with little overlap between property managers.

Wrapping it all up

Remember, pre-screening isn’t about finding the best tenant or renting a property as quickly as possible. None of the criteria had any meaningful impact on DOM.

The purpose of pre-screening is to use your time and resources as efficiently as possible during the leasing process so you don’t waste time with someone who’s unqualified.  Pre-screening, on average, eliminates 24% of prospects from the leasing funnel before they even schedule a tour, so you can focus on those that are better qualified.

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