Screen every inquiry against your own criteria, before anyone books

The questions get asked. They just get asked differently every time.

An inquiry arrives and nobody can say yes to a showing yet, because four or five things are still unknown: the move-in date, how many people, whether there is a pet, whether the income works the way your policy says it should. Someone asks. Someone waits. Two days later the same questions go out to somebody else, in a different order, with one of them forgotten.

The expensive part is not the reading. Your firm has a real policy on all of this and it lives in a coordinator's memory, so the questions get asked well on a quiet Tuesday and badly on a Friday afternoon, and the answers sit in a thread rather than anywhere you can look next month. Meanwhile the slots that should have gone to people who fit your criteria go to whoever replied fastest.

How pre-screening works in Releaser

1. Write your criteria down once

Your questions and the answers that qualify: move-in window, occupancy, pets, your income policy, whatever else your firm has decided. You write them; Releaser applies them and adds no rules of its own.

2. Share one link per property

Post it wherever you already advertise — listing portals, Facebook groups, a message thread, your own site. One link covers all of them, and everybody who opens it answers the same questions in the same order.

3. The answers are checked against your criteria

Applicants who meet them are shown your real availability and book a showing themselves. That is the whole purpose of the pre-screen: the calendar is only offered to the people your own rules say it should be offered to.

4. Every inquiry lands in one place

One list per property instead of four inboxes, with the answers attached to the person who gave them. When an applicant asks you to look at their answers again, you have them.

Pre-screening is not full screening, and the difference is the point

Two different jobs, one word.

• Pre-screening is what this page is about. Your questions, answered by the applicant, checked against the criteria you wrote, before anyone takes a showing slot. It runs in minutes, on every inquiry, at any hour.
• Full screening is what happens after someone applies for the unit: credit, background, identity and income verification, landlord references, the report a screening provider produces. Releaser does not do that and does not claim to. Keep using whichever provider you use today.

They protect two different things. The pre-screen protects your calendar and your week. The full screen supports the lease decision, and it carries consumer-reporting duties in both countries that belong to you and your provider.

So if you are shopping for tenant screening software in the sense of a credit and background report, what you need is a screening provider — and you probably have one. If what is costing you the week is asking five questions two hundred times and still showing the unit to people who were never a fit, that is this.

What it does not do

• No scores and no rankings. No applicant gets a number, a grade or a position in a list. There is nothing here that forms a view of its own about a person.
• No credit or background checks, and no verification of anything an applicant tells you.
• It does not decide who gets the unit. Your criteria gate the calendar; the lease decision is your firm's judgement.
• No rent collection, no maintenance, no accounting. Releaser covers first inquiry to booked showing and stops.

That list is short on purpose, and it describes the shipped product rather than a roadmap. What we are building next is in The Releaser Roadmap, and anything still in design says so.

Who it is for

Firms running 50 to 500 units, in the United States and Canada. Under 50, the questions are annoying but a phone and a spreadsheet cope. Over 500, you have a leasing department and a system that took a quarter to implement. In between, one or two coordinators hold every vacancy in their heads, the policy is real but unwritten, and nothing on the market is priced for the problem. That is the gap this was built for. Smaller and larger portfolios are both welcome — tell us your size on the form and we will point you at the right setup.

Read next

• Your leasing rules exist. They're in three heads and a laminated sheet. — getting the policy out of people's heads.
• The lead you can't house today — the qualified applicant you cannot house yet.
• The most valuable thing leasing software can do is stop — the messages that must reach a person.

Once an applicant qualifies, the next step is the calendar: see rental showing scheduling software. For the inquiry that arrives at 10pm, see rental inquiry automation.