How to Deny a Rental Application
- 1). Review the tenant's application. Landlords must review a candidate tenant's application and verify the information provided by the candidate tenant. This includes pulling credit reports, verifying employment and confirming previous rental history.
- 2). Determine if the tenant meets the rental qualifications. Rental qualifications differ from landlord to landlord, but a candidate tenant's application must not contain any false information. The candidate tenant must meet the requirements stated on the application. The landlord can consider such things as whether the tenant has verifiable income sufficient to pay the rent on time; if the candidate tenant's credit history shows that he pays his debts on time; whether the candidate's debt-to-income ratio is acceptable; and if the candidate tenant has a record of evictions.
- 3). Deny the rental application. The landlord must provide in writing the reasons for denial of a candidate tenant's application by way of an adverse action notice. An adverse action notice is a document stating that the candidate tenant's application has been denied; the reason(s) for denying the application; and the tenant's right to obtain a free credit report from each credit reporting agency within 60 days of the denial of the application.