Information for Tenants

Increased fairness

In a fair competition, the person most likely to be the best tenant would be offered the unit. By ensuring that selection decisions are made on valid criteria rather than invalid ones, questionnaires improve the fairness of selection. They also contribute to treating all people equally, regardless of race, looks, or other factors that typically contaminate decisions made by landlords and property managers.

Better neighbors

As a tenant, you can count on fewer neighbor problems when your building uses valid tenant screening procedures. Some of the things we screen for are risk factors for bothering other tenants (e.g., playing music too loud, having late-night parties). This becomes important when you are that "other tenant" being bothered!

Cost savings

Troublesome tenants cost landlords a lot of money in terms of maintenance, repairs, and missed rent. In a perfect world, the people causing the problems would pay to fix them. In reality, this cost is typically shared by all (including excellent tenants) in the form of higher rent. Avoiding problematic tenants can avoid these costs being passed on to you the innocent neighbor.

Results are used for 4 purposes:

1. Landlords use the results to make a decision on which applicants to accept as tenants.
2. We use results to continually monitor and update our questionnaires. This is part of our ongoing efforts to (a) improve the ability of our assessments to predict tenant quality, and (b) continually monitor our assessments to ensure that they do not discriminate on the bases of age, ethnicity, gender, and other protected classes.
3. We use results to calculate normative information. In other words, we monitor and display trends in how well people in general do on our assessments. These results are calculated on an aggregate level and contain no personally-identifying information.
4. To answer important research questions, such as what are the best predictors of desirable and undesirable tenant behaviors. When analyzing or presenting data for research, results are calculated on an aggregate level and contain no personally-identifying information.

We take great efforts to protect the security and anonymity of information. These efforts include:

• Encrypting sessions when any information is collected.
• Hosting our servers in a high-security facility with strict access controls.
• Encypting identifying information and storing it separately from responses. That way, even in the unlikely event of unauthorized access, your information would remain secure and anonymous.
• Deleting identifying information after 2 years, making your responses completely anonymous. No one (not even us!) can track your information after that.

Showing people their results would compromise the security of the assessment, eventually making them useless. This is the same reason that results are not typically shared with employees who take pre-employment questionnaires.

Yes. Questionnaires can be re-taken once every 3 months.

The amount of time varies depending on the number of questionnaires your landlord/property manager subscribes to. As a general rule, a questionnaire should take between 10 to 15 minutes.

Yes. Responses are saved frequently to ensure that you will not lose data if you are unexpectedly interrupted.