Statistics About Fraudulent Lease Applications - ApproveShield

The statistics certainly tell a concerning story about fraudulent lease applications in the rental industry.

In a survey of property management professionals by Entrata, a provider of property management software and other technologies to the rental-housing industry, 55% of respondents said their apartment communities experience fraudulent lease application attempts every few months, with 15% saying they endure multiple attempts every month.

Furthermore, 33% of respondents said they are “very concerned” about fraud, and 65% stated they are not confident in their current fraud prevention efforts.

Tactics and impacts

Lease application fraud tends to fall into two categories: deception intended to improve the tenant’s perceived ability to pay rent and deception intended to hide evidence of past mismanagement of their finances.

Attempts to improve the perceived ability to repay generally take the form of falsified employment records, pay stubs, bank statements and other documents that create an inflated picture of the applicant’s cashflow and the assets available to pay rent — even if they suffer a financial setback. It’s worth noting that the same technology advances that drive the digital revolution also make it much easier to commit this type of fraud. Even the most basic home computer can provide ample functionality to capture and re-use digital images, or to scan and edit documents. As software continues to emphasize ease-of-use, more and more tenants will be able to act on the temptation to engage in this type of behavior.

Hiding evidence of past financial mismanagement is a form of identity fraud that’s common in any industry that relies on a view of past behavior to predict future events. Entities like credit reporting agencies receive account information from lenders and consumer-entities businesses. The effective use of this data relies on the ability to retrieve a complete and accurate history each time the individual provides their identity to as part of a tenant, lending or other application. People with a patchy or unattractive financial history are inclined to manipulate their identities in the hope that the altered information won’t be matched to their negative history.

Credit reporting agencies and other consumer data aggregators are extremely good at returning complete and accurate information even when identities are manipulated. It’s central to their business and there are extraordinary business and regulatory pressures on them to do this well.

However, finding all of the relevant data sources, investigating documents provided in many different formats, putting it all together and offering a clear scoring decision is not something that can be easily accomplished. This is where Approveshield has found its niche. Through innovation and hard work this has become one company that property owners from around the country have come to rely on for discovering even the most thought through fraud schemes. 

Approveshield analysts spend countless hours researching suspicious applications and training on proven fraud cases, which directly benefits the clients as they enjoy some of the lowestlease defaults in the industry.