The Great Renter: tenant screening we built, then sold to the operators we built it for.
Property managers were stitching together credit bureaus, background checks and spreadsheets to make one decision. We built the whole workflow into one platform, priced it per report, and still run it today for landlords across Canada and the United States.
One decision, five systems.
A landlord or property manager deciding on an applicant needs a credit report, identity verification, a check against watchlists and adverse media, and a way to prove the report they are looking at has not been altered. Before The Great Renter, that meant an account with a bureau, a separate background check vendor, a consent form in a PDF, and a spreadsheet to hold it all together.
Taylor spent years on the operating side of a fast-growing background screening company before starting the studio, so we knew where the time went: chasing consent, re-keying data between systems, and explaining to tenants why a report took days.
The whole workflow in one place, from invite to verified report.
The landlord sends a secure link by email or generates a shareable invite for a property. The tenant completes consent and identity verification in a short form. Minutes later the landlord has a report with an Equifax credit score, tradelines, payment history and delinquencies, plus global watchlist and negative news screening.
Every report is SHA-256 hashed and watermarked, so a tenant can run their own screening once and share it with several landlords without anyone wondering whether it has been edited. Invite links track opens and completions in real time, and a public API with Swagger documentation lets property management platforms pull screening into their own systems.
- Basic report at $19.99: ID verification, adverse media, global watchlist, tamper-proof sharing
- Enhanced report at $29.99: everything in Basic plus a full Equifax credit report
- Volume pricing for ten or more reports a month, with team seats, roles and API access
- Tenants can self-screen and share the same verified report with multiple landlords
Invite, consent, report.
Three steps, and the landlord only touches the first one. Move through them to see what each step produces.
Priced per report, sold to the people who described the problem.
We chose pay per report over a subscription because small landlords screen a few times a year and will not carry a monthly fee for it. The first customers were the operators who had described the spreadsheet problem to us in the first place. Today the product reports over a thousand landlords on the platform, by its own count.
We still run it: support inbox, bureau relationship, compliance updates for both countries, and the funnel from first visit to first report. That operating experience is why we could rebuild a national screening provider's consumer funnel for a client in nine weeks, and why we knew how to put screening inside a property management system for another.
Regulated consent is a product problem, not a legal footnote.
The step that leaks applicants is always consent and identity. Getting that flow to feel like a two minute task rather than a compliance exercise moved completion more than any other change we made. We carried the same lesson straight into client work.
What it adds up to.
The people behind the build.
See it for yourself.
More from the studio.
Tell us what you're trying to build.
Thirty minutes, no deck, no pitch. We'll tell you what we'd do, roughly what it takes, and whether we're the right people for it. Sometimes the answer is no and that's a useful call too.