Tenant Screening in LeasePilot HQ: Credit and Background Checks the Applicant Pays For

Two things make tenant screening awkward for landlords: handling an applicant's most sensitive personal data, and being the one who fronts (or fights over) the screening fee. LeasePilot HQ's screening feature is designed so you touch neither. You send an invite with nothing but a name and an email, the applicant provides their own sensitive details and pays the fee directly, and the credit and criminal results come back to you — with the underlying report fetched live and never stored. This is a Q&A-style walk through exactly how it flows.

What do I actually enter to start a screening?

Go to Screening in the sidebar and click Request screening. You enter only the applicant's first name, last name, and email address — that's the whole form on your side. You are not collecting their Social Security number, their date of birth, or their income; that comes later, and it comes from them, on a secure page you never have to handle. The screening fee itself is set once in your admin settings and charged directly to the applicant, which means your cost as the landlord is $0.

What does the applicant experience?

The applicant receives two emails, and the split is deliberate:

• • The first is an invite to complete their personal details — address, date of birth, SSN, income — on a secure LeasePilot HQ page, so that data goes straight from them into a protected form rather than through you
• • The second contains a link to TenantAlert, the screening provider, where the applicant verifies their identity and pays the screening fee on TenantAlert's own hosted page

Because payment is collected on the provider's hosted page and the sensitive details go into a secure page directly from the applicant, you're kept out of both the money and the raw personal data. (One practical tip worth passing to applicants: have them check their spam folder if either email doesn't appear, since these transactional emails occasionally get filtered.)

What does the screening include?

Each screening runs a credit check reported with a Vantage Score and a national criminal background check. Once the applicant finishes their identity verification, the results return automatically — there's no step where you have to go fetch them. In your dashboard you get the credit score and a recommendation saved for quick reference, and a link to open the full live report.

How is the full report handled — and why 'live'?

This is the most important detail for compliance. When you want to see the complete credit and criminal report, you expand the applicant card on the Screening page and click View Live Report, which fetches the full report directly from TenantAlert at that moment. The credit report data is never stored on LeasePilot HQ's servers — it's pulled live each time, in line with FCRA requirements around handling consumer credit data. You can view it as many times as you need; only the credit score and recommendation are saved locally for quick reference. In practical terms, you get the information to make a decision without becoming a permanent warehouse of applicants' full credit files.

How do I track where each applicant is in the process?

Every screening shows one of four statuses, so you always know who's stuck and who's ready:

• • Invite sent — the email has been delivered but the applicant hasn't started
• • In progress — the applicant has submitted their information
• • Completed — the report is ready to view
• • Declined

Expand any applicant to see their full details, copy the application link to resend it manually if someone lost the email, or delete old requests to keep the dashboard tidy. The status column turns screening from a black box into a pipeline you can actually manage across several applicants at once.

A note on using this fairly

The tooling makes screening fast, but the responsibility for applying it consistently stays with you. Decide your criteria — credit standard, income ratio, background considerations — in writing before you start reviewing anyone, and apply the same standard to every applicant. Fair-housing protections (and additional protected classes in many states and cities) mean a documented, uniform process is your best protection, and a system that runs the same check the same way for everyone supports that consistency rather than replacing your judgment.