Latest · Renter behaviour

Weak Screening Is Now a Marketing Problem

September 10, 2026

Propmodo's latest reporting says vacancy is climbing across multifamily portfolios, and part of the cause is inside leasing offices, not just the market. Oversupply is squeezing operators into weaker screening standards and smaller deposits to fill units faster, and that combination is quietly building bad debt risk that shows up months later on someone's P&L.

Here's the part that lands on marketing's desk. When occupancy pressure goes up, the instinct is always to push more volume into the top of the funnel. More leads, more spend, more urgency to fill the pipeline. But if screening is already loosening to compensate, flooding it with more unqualified traffic just accelerates the exact risk this article is describing. You'd be optimizing for a number that makes the problem worse.

This is a moment to actually defend lead quality as a metric, not just log it. If your team reports cost per lead and lease-up pace without ever pulling through to delinquency or bad debt by source, you're flying blind on the thing that actually matters. Pull renewal and payment performance by acquisition channel. Some of your cheapest leads are probably your most expensive residents.

None of this is a reason to panic. It is a reason to stop treating every lead the same and start asking which channels are sending you renters, not just applicants.

Source: Propmodo, September 10, 2026