Latest · Rules & compliance

Publishing Your Screening Criteria Cuts Both Ways

September 2, 2026

Publishing your screening criteria is a good idea. Most operators still get the wording wrong.

Here's the case for publishing at all. An applicant who sees "2.5x rent in verifiable income, 620 minimum credit score, no prior evictions in 7 years" on your website self-selects before they submit an application fee. That saves your leasing team a denial conversation and saves the applicant money they didn't need to spend. It also gives you a paper trail. If you say the criteria are X and you apply X consistently, you've built your own defense against a disparate treatment claim.

The failure mode isn't publishing. It's publishing criteria that don't match what your onsite team actually does, or publishing criteria that read like a proxy for a protected class.

On the first problem: if your website says "no felonies," but your regional approves felony convictions from more than seven years ago on a case by case basis, you now have a written policy that contradicts your practice. HUD's 2016 guidance on the use of criminal records under the Fair Housing Act warned that blanket criminal history bans can produce a disparate impact on protected groups, because incarceration rates aren't evenly distributed across race. A published blanket ban is worse than an unpublished one, because it's evidence.

On the second: any criterion that isn't tied to an individualized, job-related, business-necessity type standard is a target. HUD's guidance specifically calls out policies that exclude applicants based on arrest records alone, as opposed to convictions, as very difficult to justify. An arrest isn't proof of conduct.

Then there's the state layer, and this is where flattening the topic gets people in trouble. A growing number of cities and states have "fair chance" or "second chance" housing ordinances that limit how far back you can look, what you can ask about at what point in the process, and what you're allowed to publish about criminal history screening at all. Some require you to wait until after a conditional offer to even run the background check. These rules vary by jurisdiction and change often. What's compliant in one metro can be a violation two counties over. If your portfolio spans multiple states, do not assume one criteria page works everywhere.

The FCRA adds another layer entirely, separate from fair housing. If you're using a third-party screening report to deny or condition an application, the FTC and CFPB require adverse action notices with specific content: the reason, the reporting agency's information, and the applicant's right to dispute. That's not a marketing page issue, but it's often the marketing team who owns the applicant-facing copy that sits next to it. Know where your responsibility ends and your screening vendor's begins.

Here's what I'd actually publish: income multiple, minimum credit score range (not a hard cutoff if your policy has flexibility), and general categories you screen for, without listing specific disqualifying offenses or timeframes. Link to a fuller written policy available on request rather than laying out every rule on a public page. That gives applicants enough to self-select without locking you into language a state law might outdate in six months.

Here's what I would not do: publish exact lookback periods for criminal history on a public-facing page. States are actively legislating on exactly this point, and a specific number in writing is much harder to walk back than a vague policy you can update quietly.

This is not legal advice. Have counsel review your published criteria against the specific states and cities you operate in before you post anything.

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