You’ve got a vacancy. Someone fills out an application. They seem fine. You approve them, hand over the keys, and two months later they’ve stopped paying rent and you’re staring down an eviction timeline that costs you thousands of dollars you weren’t planning to spend.
We see this play out more than we’d like to. And almost every time, the root cause is the same thing: the owner either skipped the screening process, rushed through it, or applied it inconsistently across applicants.
Tenant screening sounds simple. Pull a credit report, check a background, make a call. But the gap between doing it casually and doing it correctly is where most of the financial pain lives. In a city like Philadelphia, where local ordinances layer on top of federal fair housing law and state landlord-tenant rules, that gap gets expensive fast.
This isn’t a lecture. We’ve worked with 250 property owners across this city for 40 years, and we’ve seen every variation of this mistake. What follows is what we’d tell a friend over coffee who just bought their first rental property and asked us how to screen tenants without getting themselves into trouble.
In This Guide
- Why Bad Tenants Are So Expensive
- Credit Scores Tell Part of the Story
- Income Verification: The Number That Actually Matters
- Rental History Is the Most Underused Filter
- Philadelphia’s Screening Rules Are Stricter Than You Think
- The Screening Criteria You Actually Need in Writing
- Don’t Screen Too Aggressively Either
- Security Deposits: The Rules You Can’t Ignore
- What We Actually Do When We Receive an Application
- Rental Licensing Before You Screen Anyone
- What to Do If You’re Not Sure Where to Start
Why Bad Tenants Are So Expensive
Let’s talk dollars first, because that’s usually what gets people’s attention.
A Philadelphia eviction, when you account for court fees, missed rent while the unit sits tied up in the process, legal representation, and getting the unit back into rentable condition, runs somewhere between $3,500 and $7,000 or more. That’s not a worst-case figure. That’s what we actually see.
“A Philadelphia eviction, when you account for court fees, missed rent while the unit sits tied up in the process, legal representation, and getting the unit back into rentable condition, runs somewhere between $3,500 and $7,000 or more.”
And the timeline isn’t fast. Under normal court conditions in the city, an eviction filing can take four to eight weeks from filing to judgment. If you’ve got a $1,200/month unit sitting in legal limbo, that’s lost income you’re not getting back.
One owner we work with found this out the hard way. A previous property manager had placed a tenant in her unit without verifying employment. The tenant’s income wasn’t sufficient, late payments started by month two, and by the time the dust settled, the turnover cost her nearly $4,000 between the rent she never collected and getting the unit ready for the next applicant. She came to us after that experience, and she told us she felt “like a partner, not a number.” That’s what we aim for. But we’d much rather have helped her before the problem, not after.
The point is, a thorough upfront screening process isn’t a formality. It’s the cheapest thing you’ll do.
Credit Scores Tell Part of the Story
The 620 credit score threshold is common among Philadelphia landlords, and it’s a reasonable starting point. But if you’re treating a credit score as the whole answer, you’re missing things that matter more.
A credit report is a snapshot of debt and payment history. It doesn’t tell you whether someone pays rent. Medical debt, student loans, or a rough patch three years ago can tank a score without saying anything meaningful about how that person treats a landlord or a lease. We’ve seen 580-score applicants who rented the same apartment for four years and held stable jobs at Penn or Jefferson Health turn out to be some of the most reliable tenants around. And we’ve seen 700-score applicants with three addresses in two years and zero verifiable rental references turn into problems.
Screening should tell a story, not just hit a number. Look at the whole picture.
Income Verification: The Number That Actually Matters
The standard rule is simple. A tenant’s gross monthly income should be at least three times the monthly rent. At a $1,200/month rental, that means verifying at least $3,600/month in income.
Verifying. Not asking. Not taking someone’s word for it.
This is where we see self-managing owners get into trouble. We worked with a Cedar Park owner who had been approving tenants based on gut feel for years. No signed income verification on file, no documented criteria. When one tenant stopped paying rent three months in, he had nothing in writing to support an eviction defense. The process became significantly harder to navigate because the paperwork foundation wasn’t there.
Acceptable income documents include recent pay stubs, tax returns for self-employed applicants, benefit statements, or offer letters with a confirmed start date. If an applicant can’t or won’t provide these, that tells you something worth knowing before you hand over keys.
Rental History Is the Most Underused Filter
This one gets skipped more than any other part of the process. People pull credit, maybe run a background check, and call it done. But actually calling a prior landlord and having a real conversation? Far less common than it should be.
Rental history is the closest thing to a prediction of future behavior that screening can give you. An applicant with a clean credit report but a landlord reference that was never actually called is not a thoroughly screened applicant. Skipping this step has cost some owners in West Philly two to three months of lost rent, anywhere from $2,400 to $3,600 at our average rental rate, when a bad placement leads to early abandonment of the lease.
When you call a prior landlord, ask directly: Would you rent to this person again? A pause before that answer is an answer.
What AppFolio Shows You That a Phone Call Won’t
We run our screenings through AppFolio, and results typically come back within 24 to 48 hours. That means a full screening decision, credit, background, and references, can usually be wrapped up in under three business days. There’s no good reason to rush past this.
AppFolio’s report will surface things that don’t always show up in a manual search, including prior eviction filings. Bob Lynch-Kraley, one of our leasing agents, ran a full AppFolio screening on an applicant for a Grays Ferry owner who was anxious to fill the unit quickly. The report flagged a prior eviction filing. The owner wanted to move fast, but that flag was worth stopping for. It saved her a very likely repeat situation.
Speed feels urgent when a unit is empty. But a month of vacancy is cheaper than a bad placement.
Philadelphia’s Screening Rules Are Stricter Than You Think
The Criminal History Ordinance
Philadelphia has the Fair Criminal Record Screening Standards ordinance, which most people shorten to FCRSS. Under this rule, landlords cannot ask about criminal background until after a conditional offer has been made. And even then, if you’re considering rescinding that offer based on what you find, you’re required to conduct an individualized assessment of the conviction, its nature, how long ago it occurred, and its relevance to tenancy.
We worked with a multi-family owner in University City who had set a blanket “no criminal history” policy. She didn’t know about the individualized assessment requirement. Our team helped her revise those criteria before that policy turned into a complaint filed with the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations. A fair housing complaint, even one that gets resolved, takes time, money, and energy you don’t want to spend.
Source of Income Protections
Philadelphia also has a source of income anti-discrimination ordinance. Landlords in the city, including across the West Philly zip codes we work in most (19143, 19104, 19146), cannot reject an applicant solely because they use Section 8 or Housing Choice Vouchers. This applies across the board.
Owners sometimes push back on this. But practically speaking, a Section 8 tenant with verified income and strong rental history is often more predictable than a market-rate applicant with a shorter track record. The screening criteria should assess the person, not the payment source.
University City and the Co-Signer Question
If you own a property in University City, Powelton Village, or West Powelton, a large share of your applicants are going to be students or graduate students from Drexel or Penn. Limited credit history is normal for this group. A co-signer policy handles this, but here’s the catch: if you accept a co-signer for one applicant, you need to apply that same policy consistently across all applicants in similar circumstances. Approving one and rejecting another under identical conditions, without documented reasoning, is how fair housing complaints get started. Fines begin at $16,000 for a first offense.
The Screening Criteria You Actually Need in Writing
Here’s something a lot of owners don’t do: write down their criteria before they start reviewing applications.
Your screening policy should be documented, applied uniformly, and reviewed for legal compliance before you run a single application through it. That document is your protection if an applicant ever claims they were unfairly rejected.
When you do reject someone based on a consumer report (a credit check or background screening), Pennsylvania requires you to send an adverse action notice telling the applicant which reporting agency was used and that they have the right to dispute the report. Skipping this isn’t just sloppy. It creates legal exposure.
If you want to look up existing licensing or screening compliance issues, the City’s Licenses and Inspections department has a rental license search function online. And speaking of that: every unit rented in Philadelphia requires a rental license from L&I. An owner without one cannot legally pursue eviction. We run into this occasionally with owners who come to us mid-tenancy and didn’t realize this step was required when they first rented the unit.
Don’t Screen Too Aggressively Either
This is the one that surprises people.
Owners assume tighter criteria always means a safer outcome. But in Philadelphia’s regulatory environment, an informal “high bar” policy that’s enforced inconsistently is a bigger liability than a documented moderate policy applied uniformly. Income thresholds set far above 3x rent, automatic rejections with no documented reasoning, blanket policies on any protected characteristic — these don’t just filter out bad tenants. They filter in complaints.
We’ve also seen this backfire in neighborhoods like Cedar Park and Spruce Hill, where the renter population skews toward long-term families and established community members. A screening policy calibrated only for young professionals with high credit scores and short rental histories will filter out exactly the kind of tenants who would have stayed four or five years and kept the place in good shape.
Know your submarket. Your criteria should match the reality of who rents in that neighborhood.
Security Deposits: The Rules You Can’t Ignore
Pennsylvania caps security deposits at two months‘ rent for the first year of tenancy. At our average rental rate of $1,200 per month, that’s a maximum of $2,400 at move-in.
And once a tenant moves out, you have 30 days to return the deposit under Pennsylvania law. Miss that window, and you’re exposed to double the deposit amount in damages plus attorney’s fees. That’s a $4,800 penalty on a $2,400 deposit.
This is one of those areas where the paperwork and timing matter as much as the intent.
What We Actually Do When We Receive an Application
To give you a real sense of what thorough screening looks like in practice, here’s how it works on our end.
Dimitra Tzimoulis, our leasing manager, oversees the full workflow. When an application comes in, it goes through AppFolio for credit and background review, income documentation is collected and verified against the 3x standard, rental history references are contacted directly, and any flags, prior evictions, income gaps, or address history questions, get reviewed and documented before a decision is made.
The whole process usually takes under three business days. If there’s anything that requires an individualized review under FCRSS, that happens before any decision is communicated to the applicant.
No shortcuts. Every applicant runs through the same process in the same order. That consistency is what holds up if a decision ever gets questioned.
Rental Licensing Before You Screen Anyone
One more thing worth saying before you put an application form together.
You need a valid rental license from the City of Philadelphia before you can legally rent any unit in the city. You can apply for a rental license in Philadelphia online through the L&I portal, and you can also use the rental license Philadelphia search tool to check status. Owners sometimes ask how much a rental license in Philadelphia costs, and the fee varies based on unit count and property type, but it’s not significant in the context of your overall costs.
What is significant is that without a license, you lose the legal ability to evict. That’s not a risk worth taking.
What to Do If You’re Not Sure Where to Start
If you’re self-managing and feeling uncertain about whether your current screening process would hold up under scrutiny, that’s a fair concern. Most informal processes wouldn’t.
We manage around 1,000 properties across the city, and we’ve spent 40 years building out systems that work in Philadelphia’s specific regulatory environment. The screening piece is one we take seriously because the downstream cost of getting it wrong is too high to ignore.
One client described the experience of working with us as not just being handled, but being part of the conversation. That’s the intent. We’re not looking to take over your property and disappear. Owners who feel that way stick around.
If your current screening process feels more like a gamble than a system, we’re open to a conversation.
FAQ
What credit score should I require for rental applicants in Philadelphia?
Many landlords in the city use 620 as a baseline, but a credit score alone shouldn’t be the deciding factor. An applicant with a lower score and strong rental history often represents less risk than someone with a high score and no verifiable landlord references.
Can I reject a Philadelphia tenant for having a Section 8 voucher?
No. Philadelphia’s source of income ordinance prohibits landlords from rejecting applicants solely because they pay with Housing Choice Vouchers. This applies city-wide, including across the West Philly neighborhoods where most of our properties are located.
When can I ask a rental applicant about their criminal history?
Under Philadelphia’s FCRSS ordinance, you cannot ask about criminal history until after you’ve made a conditional offer. If you consider rescinding that offer based on what a background check reveals, you’re required to conduct an individualized assessment before doing so.
How long do I have to return a security deposit in Pennsylvania?
Pennsylvania law requires landlords to return a tenant’s security deposit within 30 days of move-out. If you miss that deadline, you can be liable for double the deposit amount plus the tenant’s attorney’s fees.
What income should I require to qualify a tenant?
The widely used standard is gross monthly income of at least three times the monthly rent. On a $1,200/month unit, that means verifying at least $3,600/month in documented income. The key word is verifying — ask for pay stubs, tax returns, or benefit statements, not just a verbal number.
Do I need a rental license before I can screen tenants in Philadelphia?
You need a valid rental license before you can legally rent any unit in the city. Without one, you lose the legal ability to pursue eviction if problems arise. You can apply for a rental license in Philadelphia online through the L&I portal.
What happens if I apply screening criteria inconsistently across applicants?
Inconsistency is one of the fastest paths to a fair housing complaint. If one applicant is approved with a co-signer and another in the same circumstances is rejected without a documented reason, that gap is what complaints are built on. First-offense fines under the Fair Housing Act start at $16,000.
Does Philadelphia have a tenant rights resource if an applicant feels they were wrongly screened?
Yes. Tenants can reach out to local legal aid organizations or look into the Philly Tenant Hotline for guidance, and the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations handles landlord-tenant complaints filed within the city. As an owner, the best protection against any complaint is a documented, consistently applied screening policy.