A Rental Application is a document used by a landlord or property manager to assess prospective tenants who are interested in renting a room, unit or property. It looks at the prospective tenant’s personal information, household information, residential history, employment and income, and background information. Rental Applications may also be accompanied by a rental application fee, which covers the cost of processing the application and screening the tenant.

An essential part of Rental Applications is Tenant Screenings. DoorLoop lets you set up different rental application fees that can cover Tenant Screenings and Background Checks. It's highly recommended that you run background screening and request those reports to improve the quality of the tenants you approve.

Using rental applications in DoorLoop starts with your company-level settings. What you configure here will be the default for your all rental applications unless you override a section at the property level. With these settings, you’ll be able to customize many aspects of your rental application, including which information is mandatory and any additional requirements you might need that are outside of the standard categories.

To access the company default Rental Applications settings, click Settings on the main menu and then click Rental Applications under the Property Settings section.

Clicking this will bring up the Rental Applications window. There will be quite a few sections and categories that need to be filled out to create a completed rental application.

Pay close attention to the Settings section of the rental application setup since this is where you'll determine how much your applicants will pay for each application and if Tenant Screenings and Background Checks will be run.

Sections include:

After configuring your company rental application settings, you can also configure property-specific rental application settings if they are going to be different from the default settings. If no changes need to be made, you can use the company default settings for the property. If there are changes, you can configure unique settings for each property and each section of the rental application.

Mainly, if you want to make any changes to any of the sections, you would need to select the option to, specify settings for this property. Doing so will allow you to modify that specific section with different information and requirements.

After setting up your rental application settings, it is best to preview and test them out before sending them to your prospects to make sure everything is working correctly and all the information that you need will be collected. To do this, while in the Rental Application settings, you would click the Save & Preview button instead of the regular Save button. This will open the rental application in Demo Mode on a new tab where you can preview each page of your rental application.

For Units to appear on your rental applications, they need to be Open for Applications. By default, Units that are created will be listed as Open.

You can edit this by clicking the 3-dots to the right of each unit and clicking Close for Applications or Open for Applications.