Zillow Tenant Screening Review

Last Updated: June 22, 2023 by Cameron Smith

Zillow’s tenant screening services are inexpensive for the applicants and thorough enough to please most landlords. The only downsides are a lengthy application process (for renters) and the omission of a few reports of lesser importance.

Sample Reports: Tenant Screening ($35)

What is Zillow?

Zillow is primarily known as one of the world’s largest sites for listing real estate—both for sale and for rent. This review will mostly cover their tenant screening service, but it’s impossible to fully remove the benefits their other services provide as a larger whole.

Zillow Features and Facts

Feature
Time to Get Results	Immediately after authorization is given
Data Source	Experian
Who Pays	Tenant
Type of Application	Through invitation or online link
Hard Inquiry	No
Nationwide Criminal & Eviction Check	Yes
Felonies & Misdemeanors	Yes
SSN Fraud Check	Yes
Terrorist Check	No
Sex Offender Check	Yes
Income Verification	No

Zillow Pros & Cons

• Trusted Name – Backed by Zillow, you can be sure that sensitive information won’t be used incorrectly.
• Reusable Applications – Your applicants can pay $35 and use their application and reports with multiple landlords. While this doesn’t save you money, a good application experience is never a bad thing for the landlord.
• Reference Contact Information – Many tenant screening services don’t gather contact information for previous landlords, employers, and personal references. Zillow does.

• Lengthy Application Process – While gathering plenty of information is useful for landlords, navigating 30+ screens will likely have some applicants leaving without finishing.
• Bare-Bones Reports – Many competitors include reports such as income verification, terrorist checks, and others that you won’t find with Zillow.
• Misleading Features – Their site advertises that landlords will receive income verification. However, their reports only show self-reported income, which shouldn’t be trusted without additional verification.

Zillow Tenant Screening Pricing

Zillow only offers a single service for tenant screening and it costs $35. Applicants can share their application and screening reports with other Zillow users for 30 days.

Their service provides:

• Credit Report
• Collections
• Nationwide Criminal Report
• Nationwide Eviction Report
• SSN Verification
• Address History
• Employment History

Zillow Walkthrough

Here’s how Zillow’s process works for creating the application, the applicant’s process, the landlord’s process, and what the reports look like.

1. Create Application

First, you’ll have to create an account. The easiest way is to go to their tenant screening page on their website and click “Screen Tenants.” Then, you’ll have the opportunity to create an account and then post a listing. You can actually screen tenants without setting your listing live, but you still need to go through this process.

Next, you’ll answer some basic personal information:

Now, you’ll put in your properties information:

You’ll verify that the information is correct:

On the next screen, in the bottom-left corner, you can click on the option to screen renters:

Click “Get Started.”

Next, you can choose to have an invitation link sent via email, or grab a link yourself that you can send to anyone.

2. Tenant Application Process

Now, we’ll see the process that the tenant goes through to fill out an application. Zillow tries to make the process smooth and easy, but the applicant must go through 30+ screens. It feels like a lot, even if they’re not gathering any more information than some of their competitors.

First, they’ll create an account:

They’ll let the applicant know what to expect:

Next, applicants will see the different sections they’ll need to fill out. Note that the warning at the top shows up because we didn’t put our listing live. We still received an email notification about the application upon submission.

Then, the applicant will put in their personal information:

When that section is complete, it takes us back here. A better user experience would be to just have the applicant continue the application, rather than have to find and click on the next section to fill out. We’ve omitted screenshots of this page in the future to avoid redundancy.

Some sections also have their own intro page, rather than going right into the application:

The applicant will fill out how many people will live there:

Then, they want to know about smoking:

Next, we get a thorough page about pets. This information (along with the past few screenshots) is the type of information we love to see on an application. It doesn’t make sense to have to reach out again to gather it.

Now we’ll see a page for a requested move-in date:

Next, is an important page section about resident history—again preceded by this introductory page:

Of course, all landlords should love this page. With many tenant screening services omitting this from the application, a page to gather landlord contact information helps Zillow stand out.

Now, they’ll gather the necessary information to pull credit and background reports:

Then, a few questions will be asked to prove the applicant’s identity:

It’s a success!

The next section covers the applicant’s income and employment history:

As far as we can tell, the only income information provided in the reports comes from the self-reported income in this section. Zillow advertises income verification, but it’s not truly that.

This is a helpful section where the applicant can provide documents to prove their income, but other services provide actual 3rd-party verification. Based on what their website says, we thought that’s what we were going to get.

Again, the applicant will supply contact information for a key person that all landlords should call:

An employment history can help a landlord determine how stable the applicant’s income and career is.

Now it’s time to pay:

This confirmation page tells us that we still need to finish submitting the application. It’s a little strange because most of the time, payment is the mechanism that submits the application. Anyway, on this page the applicant can view their own reports (a fantastic feature), but then can also continue to submit the reports to the landlord.

Here’s where the applicant submits their application:

Applicants will now give authorization for the landlord to view all their information:

The landlord will now be notified!

3. Landlord Reports View

By far the easiest way to find the reports is to click on the link in a notification email that Zillow sends you. Before looking at any reports, they will show you some basic information provided by the applicant:

Here, you can see the identity has been verified and the reports are ready:

At this point, you’ll have to go through a simple identity verification process in order to be able to view the applicant’s reports.

You must give consent that Experian can pull information to confirm who you are:

After a simple process of asking for a little bit of information, they’ve verified identity and the landlord can move on.

If your property is located in California, there are a few extra stipulations (we haven’t seen this on any other tenant screening service).

4. Credit Report

On the credit report, we’ll first see a solid graphic depicting credit score:

Then, we’ll see how much the applicant pays each month on debt payments. This is critical information for a landlord:

Next, landlords can look at the individual tradelines to see who the applicant owes money to as well as the amounts:

Then, the report includes any debts that have been sent to collections, and then a report of recent credit inquiries (within 2 years).

We’ll see three past addresses, a couple of employers, and a notice of any bankruptcies.

5. Criminal & Eviction Report

Landlords get a fairly standard eviction and criminal report, which isn’t out of the ordinary in its plainness:

Should You Use Zillow

Backed by nearly limitless resources, Zillow has put together a useful and inexpensive tenant screening option. The application gathers a plethora of useful information, and the process is easy to follow and intuitive. However, because Zillow offers so many other services, finding information about and then ordering reports for tenant screening isn’t user friendly. Their reports cover the essentials, but are missing some of the (less important) reports that some competitors offer.

While they don’t quite stack up to the top-end competition, they do a good enough job to entice landlords who also want to use Zillow’s rental listing service.

Zillow Frequently Asked Questions

These are the most common questions asked about Zillow:

1. Is Zillow a Legitimate Site?

Zillow is a legitimate website. Their core real estate listing service is one of the largest such businesses in the world.

2. Does Zillow Run a Hard Credit Inquiry?

Credit checks from Zillow are done via soft inquiry and will not affect the applicant’s credit score.

3. Does Zillow Run a Hard Credit Inquiry?

Powered by Experian, Zillow reports are thorough and accurate.