Recommend me an online rental application tool?

March 22, 2015 5:57 PM

I'm a landlord looking to make renting my property easier. The idea of using something like rentapplication.net to collect applications and credit checks appeals to me. There is also rentscreener.com and others. I wouldn't be using this to manage ongoing tasks or multiple properties, which a site like buildium.com seems to be geared towards. Anything I should know about these sites? Is there any reason I shouldn't use a tool like this? Which one should I use?
posted by mumblingmynah to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

I am a small landlord (live in one unit of a two family house, own one other single family house). We like to do basic screening of our tenants, mostly for creditworthiness but also for a basic criminal background check.

For our last round of applications we used MyRental.net which is a service offered by Core Logic. I found the service very clear and easy to use, and felt that it would also be clear, easy to use, and respectful for the tenants.

Last week I got an e-mail from them saying "CoreLogic is discontinuing support of the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) v3.0 encryption protocol for the CoreLogic MyRental product in order to address data security concerns related to the Padding Oracle on Downgraded Legacy Encryption (POODLE) security vulnerability." Granted, POODLE was discovered last October and SSL v3.0 is very old, but it was still nice to see that they were aware of such things and taken action on them.
posted by alms at 7:25 PM on March 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

I use Cozy to screen tenants and allow my tenants to pay rent via automatic deposit. Cozy is free for landlords and tenants, they only charge for credit reports. The only downside I've seen is it uses ACH to transfer money, which is notoriously unreliable and slow.
posted by mattking17 at 3:27 AM on March 23, 2015

Seconding Cozy -- I think it's the best option out there. Also adding RadPad and Lovely.
posted by doctordrey at 11:26 AM on March 26, 2015