LeaseRunner’s robust screening reports, purchased á la carte, are one of the best options available on the market—but applicants are left footing a higher bill. Similar services can be found elsewhere with better pricing.
Sample Reports: Credit ($22), Criminal ($16), Financial ($10), Eviction ($13).
What is LeaseRunner?
LeaseRunner is a tenant screening service that provides credit and background checks on rental applicants. While LeaseRunner offers many resources for property managers, this review will focus on their flagship tenant screening service.
LeaseRunner Features and Facts
| Feature | |
| Time to Get Results | Immediately after authorization is given |
| Data Source | Experian |
| Who Pays? | Options for either landlord or tenant |
| Type of Application | Online through their portal |
| Hard Inquiry | No |
| Nationwide Criminal & Eviction Check | Yes |
| Felonies & Misdemeanors | Yes |
| SSN Fraud Check | Yes |
| Terrorist Check | Yes |
| Income Verification | Yes, for $10 |
LeaseRunner Pros & Cons
- Á La Carte Services – Pay for exactly what you need and nothing more.
- Comprehensive Reporting – Their screening reports contain everything a landlord would expect and more—including an offering for a full financial profile.
- Easy to Use – Their application and screening reports are designed to be user-friendly whether accessed by computer, tablet, or phone.
- Expensive – Their core services are more expensive than most of the competition.
- Lax Rent-to-Income Guidelines– Their income recommendations for applicants are lower than generally excepted industry standards, and they use the less-accurate rent-to-income rather than debt-to-income ratio.
- Confusing Glitch – As covered later in the walkthrough, applicants are run through a messy, complicated process if they want to sign up for the Financial Profile after initially turning in their application.
LeaseRunner Tenant Screening Pricing
| Service | Price | Description |
| Credit Report | $22 | Receive a complete report |
| Criminal Report | $16 | Receive a nationwide criminal history |
| Financial | $10 | Receive a 3-month overview of their finances |
| Eviction Report | $13 | Receive a nationwide eviction report |
The cost of their core credit, criminal, and eviction reports would cost a landlord $51, while adding in the financial report adds in another $10. This is certainly on the pricier side—and that doesn’t even include the prohibitive e-signature cost of $39.
LeaseRunner Walkthrough
Here’s how the process works and what it looks like for both the landlord and the applicant.
1. Create Application
Once you’ve created a Landlord’s login, the first thing you need to do is to add the property that you wish to rent out. On the home page, you can go to “Properties” and click “Add Property.”
From there, you’ll fill out relevant information for your unit, including a property nickname for easy reference later. After you fill your property’s profile, you can head back to the home screen, where you’ll see three options. Let’s go create a link to a digital application:
Then you’re taken to this screen where you can select the property you just created:
Then, LeaseRunner makes it incredibly easy to select which services you want each of your applicants to purchase when applying. There’s even a note at the bottom that makes it clear that these services will be paid for by the applicant.
So far, the process is about as easy and clean as you could hope for. Without any prior knowledge of the system, users can find what they need intuitively.
2. Tenant Application Process
Now, let’s say that someone has clicked on your application link, whether through an ad, a social media post, or you emailed it. The first step of the process is a simple form so you can collect their email address:
Then, the applicant receives this email:
Right up front, the applicant is aware of all fees, monthly rent, and security deposit. This is an excellent way to make sure that everyone is one the same page and to keep out unqualified applicants who aren’t interested in paying the $61 application fee.
Next, the applicant will get into the meat of the application by filling out their contact information:
If the landlord selects that they would like a Financial Report from each applicant, then they will be asked to connect their bank account. This could be a step that some applicants balk at, but they use a third-party service called DecisionLogic. This should help put the applicant at ease because a third-party can ensure a seamless connection as well as more security.
Next, the applicant will give their employment history. You can use this information to see if they have a satisfactory employment history (no big gaps, no job hopping) as well as reach out to their employers later to verify the information given.
Then your applicants will be asked to give a 3-year rental history. This section is mostly so that you can follow up with prior landlords to find out if your applicant had a history of:
- Paying late
- Breaking lease agreements
- Shirking responsibilities
- Destroying property
These are all items that wouldn’t show up on a formal report (except perhaps late payments or a police report for destroyed property), so collecting this information is essential.
Or, if your applicant has no rental history, they can put in their mortgage payment (which gives a little more context to what they can afford). They can also select “Other.” A good example of that would be a young person who has recently moved out of their parent’s house. The prompt will ask them to describe their current situation.
Next up is the all-important income and social security number (SSN). While an SSN isn’t required to pull reports, many landlords do require them. LeaseRunner has this as a required field. Any applicant who doesn’t want to submit their SSN would have to reach out to the landlord directly, but you are within your right to reject applicants who don’t wish to give their SSN.
The income number will give you the best idea of whether your applicant can pay the rent. Later on, LeaseRunner will share with you the rent-to-income for this applicant.
Then the application requires information about vehicles and pets, including a place for notes. This is extremely useful to gather information up front about what size the pets are, if they’re well trained, and if the animal is an emotional support animal (ESA) or service animal.
Here the application gathers some more information, as well as another place for more general notes. The applicant could mention:
- ESAs/service animals
- Why they would make good tenants
- Explain extenuating circumstances
- Explain something you’ll find on their credit, eviction, criminal, or financial reports (“I was evicted 4 years ago because…”)
Next up are the release forms to access their credit, criminal, and eviction reports. They will also agree that they’ve read the terms and conditions and that they’re telling the truth. The terms and conditions are a nice benefit of working with a company like LeaseRunner because most landlords who do this on their own wouldn’t have created those.
Then, the applicant has the choice to select which reports they’d like to pay for, and takes their credit card information. One missing feature here would be to see which reports the landlord is asking for.
For this review, the Financial Profile was skipped in order to see how adding it later is handled in the process.
Overall, the process for applicants couldn’t be smoother. It’s a nice feature that LeaseRunner requires name and email to be submitted first, meaning that you now have a lead that you can follow up with. When the applicant clicks on the application in the email, it’s a way to verify that their email is correct.
The rest of the process is smooth and seamless, and there shouldn’t be any confusion for an applicant when filling everything out.
3. Landlord Reports View
Once a potential tenant fills out the application, you’ll get an email notification:
The interface for looking over an application has several tabs that you can click around to quickly see all the information (again, the Financial Profile hasn’t been submitted yet for this test applicant). Those first two tabs include all the information that the applicant included:
4. Credit Report
Before you can see an applicant’s credit report, you must first verify your identity. This keeps you in compliance with the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) in ensuring that only the people authorized to view the credit report will be able to do so. Without a tenant screening service, many landlords would skip this step.
Once inside, the first thing you’ll get are the high-level points of the applicant’s credit history. This is extremely useful, as many credit reports come in a simple text format and can be hard to decipher. A view like this makes it incredibly easy for a landlord to digest. Furthermore, having that “Monthly Payment” column can help a landlord quickly calculate a debt-to-income ratio.
Underneath the overview, you’ll also find this information:
- Address history (nice for verifying application information)
- Employers
- Judgments/bankruptcies
- Credit inquiries
- Open tradelines, including monthly payment, total amount, status, and month-by-month whether the payment was made
Overall, the information here is useful, thorough, and presented in a way that can be easily read and understood.
5. Criminal & Eviction Reports
The next report is the criminal report:
Then we see the Eviction Report:
If all goes well, there isn’t much to see here other then “No criminal convictions found within the last seven years” and “No eviction records found.”
It’s a plus in LeaseRunner’s favor that both of these reports are national. In fact, there isn’t even an option to select state-specific reports, which don’t give enough information to the landlord.
6. Financial Report
While credit, criminal, and eviction data are standard among tenant screening services, not all of them provide a Financial Profile. For only $10, you can verify income, see how their bank accounts look, and get an overall sense if this applicant can make rent each month.
Now, the applicant in this walkthrough example didn’t purchase the Financial Profile. However, you can order and pay for reports yourself, or send an email to request the applicant pay for and authorize the report. In the example below, the landlord paid for the report, and sent a notice to the applicant that the report has been paid for and that they just need the applicant’s authorization.
Here’s where you can request a report and who pays for it:
Here’s what the email looks like that LeaseRunner sends to the applicant to get authorization to pull the Financial Profile. The first line under the salutation is customizable:
One major downside of this process is that the example tenant in this scenario was taken back to connect their bank account three different times. The process proved a little clunky and cost about 10 minutes of time to figure out. However, this could all have been avoided if the applicant had selected to pay for a Financial Profile in the first place.
Once the report is paid for and the applicant has authorized this report, you can now see the Financial Profile. One of the first things you’ll see is a standard rent-to-income ratio calculation.
However, requiring only 2.5x the rent amount for income isn’t a great metric. It’s pretty standard to require 3x rent. However, rent-to-income in general is a flawed metric because it doesn’t take into account debt payments. If you have two applicants that make $7k per month, but one has double the debt, that’s important to know, but not reflected in this graph.
Next, you’ll be able to get an in-depth look at cash trends over the past 3 months. While it’s interesting to see, it’s not overly useful. Cash balances can be skewed by large payments going out or perhaps a large gift coming in. In addition, you’ll be able to see
- Current balance
- Average balance over last 90 days
- Average balance last month
However, the most useful aspect of the Financial Profile is that you can see the expenses and income itemized in their bank account. Now you can get a feel for how they’re spending their money. Perhaps this a bit nitpicky for a landlord, but if you’re deciding between two applicants, knowing how they spend their money can make a difference. There’s no screenshot included here for privacy purposes.
Should You Use LeaseRunner?
Overall, LeaseRunner provides a robust service designed to service landlords of less than 10 (or so) rental units. Their á la carte options, user-friendly processes, and thorough reports are highlights.
However, they also charge more for their service than nearly every other tenant screening company out there. Some landlords may find their easy-to-use platform to be worth the cost, but there are plenty of options out there offering nearly the same service for $10-$20 cheaper per applicant screened.
If it were cheaper, LeaseRunner would have our full endorsement, rather than a partial one.
LeaseRunner Frequently Asked Questions
These are the most common questions asked about LeaseRunner:
1. Is LeaseRunner a Legitimate Site?
LeaseRunner is a legitimate site. They are FCRA compliant and have been doing tenant screening reports for rental applicants since 2011.
2. Does LeaseRunner Run a Hard Credit Inquiry?
Credit checks from LeaseRunner are done via soft inquiry and will not affect the applicant’s credit score.
3. Are LeaseRunner’s Tenant Screening Reports Accurate?
LeaseRunner’s reports are accurate and are among the most robust and thorough reports of any tenant screening company.
