Best Way to Get Rental Pre-Approval for Tenants

When it comes to quickly finding tenants & filling your vacancy, you might be wondering if a rental pre-approval process exists. Fortunately, one does, and you can quickly find renters for your unit!

But where to start?

Pre-approving (also known as prescreening or prequalifying) renters can help you easily find or filter out tenants who don’t meet your minimum criteria. These criteria might include credit scores, reported income, smoking, pets, and more. However, if you’ve never prescreened tenants before, you can use this article to get started building your own pre-approval process.

Pre-Approval for Rental Property

When it comes to pre-approvals for your rentals you’ll want to list out the minimum requirements that you want tenants to meet. These minimum requirements usually include options for credit scores, employment, smoking, and pets.

Minimum requirements are important for streamlining your application process. Why? It helps quickly narrow down a pool of applicants who are qualified for your rental property.

After you’ve established your minimum requirements, create a system that can replicate your prescreening process over and over again. This is in part to ensure you’re adhering to Fair Housing guidelines. However, it also ensures your screening process is as smooth and scalable as possible.

Additionally, if you’re seeking rental pre-approvals for your units, you’ll want applicants to easily understand and complete the process

Pre-Approval Rental Application

Now, how do you create a rental application for pre-approving tenants? This process will be different for each landlord. Some prefer phone, email, Google forms, or in-person.

However, you want to maintain a scalable prequalify system that lets you easily manage all your pre-approvals. (Or, easily reject applicants, if necessary).

To get a rental pre-approval application, one option is to use RentRedi’s built-in prequalification form. This form is available to all your applicants when you subscribe to RentRedi. And, you can easily send them links to your listing from which they can prequalify!

Even better, RentRedi has a built-in function that lets you easily approve or reject tenants based on their prequalification answers and your minimum requirements.

How Tenants Can Get Rental Pre-Approval

If you’re using phone or email to conduct your rental pre-approvals, make sure you have copies of your questions so you can easily take notes (or the applicant can reply via email) and organize the documents by applicants.

However, if you’re prescreening tenants in person, make sure you have enough hard copies on hand so you can distribute them to each applicant that comes to view your rental.

On the other hand, if you’re using RentRedi to prequalify your tenants, you can send a customized link from your listings, they will click the Prequalify button, and can apply from their mobile device or web portal!

When tenants meet your minimum requirements and pass the pre-approval process, you can pass them along to the next phase of your screening process (typically a background check and application).

Tenant Screening & Application Process

Depending on the system you use, passing tenants from the pre-approval process to the next stage of applying can range from easy to hard.

If you’re prescreening over the phone, email, or in-person, you’ll need to follow up with the tenant on whatever method of communication you previously contacted them with.

If your applicants successfully prequalified for your unit with RentRedi, you can invite them to apply & complete a TransUnion-certified tenant screening (with criminal, credit, and eviction reports). This process can be done via their RentRedi mobile or web app!

And voila!

Once you have a tenant who passes your pre-approval, application, and screening process, you’ll have a new renter & your tenant will have a new home!