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.

DoorLoop lets you setup 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 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 default Rental Applications settings, you would first click Settings located on the main menu. Then you would click on the Rental Applications button under the Property Settings section.

Clicking this will bring up the Rental Applications settings window. For those who have been with DoorLoop for quite some time, you'll notice that the new settings window will look very different.

To set up the Application Fees, you will need to have a verified address entered. If you've already done this, read on.

On the Manage Fees section, you'll have three options now when selecting fees:

You will need to click the box labeled "By using the rental application, I accept the DoorLoop and TransUnion Terms and Conditions." to use Rental Applications.

If you have any specific instructions for your applicants, this is where you'd include them. This is what will be shown on the first page of the rental application. You can also add instructions to each page of the application separately.

Add instructions (optional) for this section. This section will ask for general information about the applicant, such as their name, contact information, demographics, ID numbers, etc. As mentioned above, you now have the option to make certain fields required or not. For instance, not everyone has a Drivers License, so now you have the option to have your applicants skip these sections if necessary. You will notice that some sections can not be deselected because they are required.

Add instructions (optional) for this section. This section asks about the applicant's current residential situation. Here they'll enter their current address, when they started living at that location, and more. You will notice that some sections can not be deselected because they are required.

Add optional instructions for this section. This section has your applicants tell you where they are working now, and their employment status. Here you can add fields for when they started, when they ended, a current supervisor, and more. You will notice that some sections can not be deselected because they are required.

The rest of the sections on the rental application are optional, though they do help gather more information about your applicants. You can choose to turn any of these sections on or off, and can even make these sections required if necessary.

If you have additional questions you would like to ask the applicant that isn't part of any of the categories above, you can add them here. If you enable this section, we do provide some sample questions you can ask, but you can modify these to fit your needs. Use the + Add Another link to add more questions and the Trash Can icon to remove questions. You can even change the Question Type.

You can use the "Set this section as a requirement to submit the application" if you want this section to be required by the applicant.

This is another section that isn't required but can be helpful. Here you can request that applicants upload certain documents if they're necessary as part of your rental process. For instance, you might want a copy of their driver's license, a recent pay stub, or more. Here you can add those items and mark them as whether or not they're mandatory to continue.

While not necessary, you may want to include this section as part of your rental applications. This is where you would add information such as whether or not application fees are non-refundable, and disclaimers, requirements, policies and procedures, and more.

This section lets you assign Users within your organization who will be notified whenever a new application is received. This could be you, an assistant, or someone in the office. You can assign multiple Users to receive these notifications as well.

This will be where the general link for the rental application will be. This is a link for an application that isn't specific to any property. If you need a property-specific rental application link, you'll need to grab that from the property. (Read the next section for instructions on how to do this).

When you are satisfied with the way your rental application looks, you can click Save to finish.

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 by selecting, specify settings for this property. This way, some sections can remain the same while others are customized.

To set your property-level rental application settings, do the following:

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, if their address is verified as valid. You can see in the example below how two of the properties show Open status while the other three show "Property address not valid".

The ones that are Open will appear in your rental applications while the others will not until the address is verified as valid. To verify the address, click the Property address not valid link. You will be taken to the Rental Applications setting window. Click the Verify Property Address link.

You'll now be taken to the Edit Property window, specifically the General Information section. Check and edit the address section of the property and click Save when it is corrected.

You will know if it is now verified when it takes you back to the Manage Fee section of the Rental Applications setting window and you no longer see the error about Property Address Verification. The Units on the property will also now show up as Open when you view the Units page.

Once you do this, those Units that weren't verified and that are now Open will appear in your Rental Applications.

For Units to show up on the rental application with the Rent amount, you will need to set their listing status to Listed. Here's how you would do that: