Kijiji: tenant screening inside the marketplace where Canadians already find their rentals.

Kijiji has been the default classifieds site in much of Canada since it launched in 2005, and in Ontario and the east it plays the role Craigslist once played in Vancouver: the place people go first for a used couch, a car, or an apartment. Its current push is trust. It now verifies users and puts a Know before you go message beside its rental listings.

Rentals were the gap. Listings and conversations happened on Kijiji, but the moment a landlord wanted to check an applicant they left the platform, and most small landlords had nowhere good to go. Credit bureau accounts and property management suites are built for operators with hundreds of doors. A homeowner renting a basement suite is exactly the person a fraudulent application targets, and exactly the person with no tools.

We already had the screening engine. The Great Renter runs consented credit reports through Equifax, identity verification, global watchlist and adverse media checks, and produces a tamper-proof report. What Kijiji needed was a version that lived inside its own rental workflow, so that screening starts from the conversation about a listing instead of from a separate product.

So we built a custom application and integration for Kijiji, adapted from QuickScreen, The Great Renter's one-off screening product: a landlord in a rental conversation can send a screening invite, the applicant consents and verifies their identity in a short form, and the report comes back in minutes. There is no account to create and no subscription. The landlord never handles the applicant's personal data, and it is one of very few ways in Canada to screen a tenant that quickly without property management software.

• Screening starts from a Kijiji rental conversation, not from a separate product
• Applicant consent and identity verification captured inside the flow, before any check runs
• Credit, identity, watchlist and adverse media checks from the same engine behind The Great Renter
• Pay per report, so a landlord with one unit pays for one check
• Reports are hashed and watermarked, so an applicant can reuse a verified report

Every design decision came from the same question: what does a homeowner with a basement suite need to feel safe accepting an applicant they met through a message thread? The answer was short. A credit report, a background check, proof the applicant consented, and a result that arrives before the applicant loses interest. Everything else in a screening suite is for someone else.

That is also why the partnership made sense for both sides. Kijiji gets a trust feature its rental category was missing. The Great Renter gets the widest possible distribution to the landlords it was built for. And we got to ship the product we run into the place its customers already were.

We could commit to a custom build for a national marketplace because the screening engine, the bureau relationship, the consent flow and the compliance work were already ours. That is the argument for a studio that runs its own products: when a partner needs something adjacent, the hard part is already done.