Whether you have one rental unit or one million, you need to get quality, qualified tenants. It’s one thing all landlords and property managers need, over and over again. Harmony solves the problem of marketing your unit through its myriad vacancy management and marketing solutions. It also solves the problem of communicating with prospects, scheduling showings, and all the other pieces of getting ready to fill vacant units.
Once you have the interested prospect, getting the next step right is often the difference between peace and chaos. This gap between curious prospect and contented occupant is the application and screening piece. In the old days, we used to hand over a sheet of paper to fill in their vitals, call the place where they used to live, and see what their mother had to say about them. If we got a good vibe from this, we approved the tenant and they signed a lease. That simply doesn’t work anymore. There’s data security, fair housing, consumer protections – and a host of other things that must be part of our application and screening processes. They’re in place to protect tenants, and if we do things right, they protect us, too.
To receive and process applications in the modern age, you need the best tools available. You need to collect the right information, do the right thing with it, then follow it through in the right way. Thankfully, Harmony again has you covered.
It all starts with the application. In Harmony, you configure your application exactly as you want it. Do you want one year of employment history or five? Do you want uploaded bank statements? Do you want to collect all pet and animal information? All this, and so much more, is entirely up to you – as you control every single element of the application. You can ask for a dozen things or a thousand, wording each question, and each help guide, exactly as you need. Your application is dynamic – for example, displaying only pet information for those with pets, or only additional occupant information when there will be more than one resident. In working with tens of thousands of property managers, we’ve heard every unique application desire out there. If it’s legal and fair, it’s built into the Harmony application system.
It goes well beyond the basics of simply collecting input. You can require uploads of any type – photos, documents, and more – then stay in compliance with your regulations and internal policies by destroying your copy when the applicant is approved or denied. Individual inputs, like SSNs, can be double-encrypted, so that only your application and screening administrator have access to view them. Application questions can be required in order to proceed, or optional, at your discretion.
Are applicants stuck on what you mean by personal income versus household income? The help on each input is entirely controlled by you, so you can guide your applicants along as needed. Add instructions as you see fit at the beginning and end of the application, and every section along the way. Include unit-specific applicant qualifications automatically merged into your instructions.
Collect the applicant’s signature online with the application, and let them pay online, too. Payment is fully integrated with the Harmony payments system, where you take your pick of which payment processor to use, including Stripe or PayPal (if you want near-instant setup). Application fees can be set per-unit, or as a default for all units. Payment status is clear and connected to the application, so you can see when payment is made.
Do you manage in a jurisdiction that gives tenants the right to have their data deleted from the internet upon demand? The Harmony application system has this covered, too. Applicants can delete all of their data at any time during the application process, or the portion available on the internet after they’ve submitted their application.
Do you find tenants start their application, but need to come back later to finish it after they’ve gone and collected some required information? Easy peasy with Harmony. Each applicant is emailed an application key when they start their application, and can use that key to complete the application later. Upon final submission, each application is stamped with an immutable GMT time stamp, so applications can be processed in order of arrival.
Coapplicants? Covered. The applicant email, by default, includes a coapplicant link, so anyone else can submit their own application in conjunction with the primary applicant. Harmony correlates all these, so you don’t have to figure out who applied with who.
Once you’ve received an application, the screening part of the Harmony application system is ready for your input! Start with the app score, a value given to your application based on the applicant entering or selecting information in the application that complies with your expectations. Do you require 3 times rent as household income? Simply set the impact this should have on your app score. Should previous evictions, or a short job history reduce the score of an application? You can set that too, with the impact it ought to have based on what you’re looking for.
Retrieve credit, criminal, background, and other reports from integrated providers, or use any non-integrated provider and input scores and results manually. Some integrated providers even tie in with Harmony AI to automatically indicate the status and grade/score of the various screening checks based on standard rules or your own custom default rules. If you do your own reference, employment, or landlord checks, this is easy with Harmony. The screening portion of each application allows you to input information as you receive it, and come back to update it when they call back or reply to your email. You can generate template-based letters or messages to collect information on each component you screen.
Enter your decision on each screening element, and a final decision Then send acceptance, conditional acceptance, rejection, or preclusion communications directly from the application screening using your customizable templates. Your templates include all the necessary merge fields for full compliance with all adverse action requirements.
When you accept an applicant, one click in Harmony converts them to a tenant so you can send an e-signable lease. You can even automatically import all pet and animal information from their application into their tenant profile. There’s no need to re-enter anything that they applicant already provided.
You’ll find the Harmony application system to be incredibly flexible, extremely powerful, easy to use for both you and applicants, and compliant across the board. One more way that HERO PM brings Harmony to Property Managers!