Reviewing and approving applications
The Applications page is where you read incoming tenant applications, decide who to approve, and trigger the lease creation. Approving an applicant automatically creates a draft lease and drops you onto its detail page, so you can pick up where this article leaves off in Creating a new lease.
Open Applications from the left sidebar.
1. Filter the queue
A filter strip at the top lets you narrow by status:
- All (default)
- Pending — needs your decision
- Approved
- Rejected
- Withdrawn — the applicant pulled their own application
Most of the time you’ll work with Pending.
2. Open an application
Click any row to open the full application in a side-by-side panel. You’ll see:
- Applicant — name, email, phone, date of birth.
- Current residence — address, how long they’ve lived there, current rent, their current landlord’s contact, reason for moving.
- Employment — employer, position, duration, monthly income.
- Occupants — anyone else who’ll live in the unit (name, relationship, age).
- Pets — type, breed, weight.
- Vehicles — year, make, model, plate.
- References — name, relationship, phone, email.
- Background — whether they’ve been evicted, have a felony, and what they consented to (background check, credit check).
- Message — any free-form note they sent you.
- Unit — the unit they applied to, desired move-in date, preferred term.
Tip: Look at the message, the reason for moving, and the references first. These three tell you the most about whether to call back.
3. Add manager notes
Below the application data, there’s a Manager notes text box. Use it for anything you want to remember for later — your impressions, what the current landlord said when you called, who else is looking at the unit. Click Save notes to keep them on the application.
Notes are internal — the applicant never sees them.
4. Approve or reject
Two buttons at the bottom of the panel:
- Approve — flips the application to approved, auto-creates a draft lease with the applicant as primary tenant and the unit pre-filled, and navigates you to the lease detail page. From there, fill in the rent, term, and other lease fields (Creating a new lease).
- Reject — flips the application to rejected. The applicant can be notified via the review message field if you add one (optional).
Note: Approving one application for a unit doesn’t automatically reject the others. If you have multiple applications for the same unit, reject the ones you didn’t pick — otherwise they stay in the queue marked Pending.
Quick-action buttons
On the desktop table view, each pending row also has small ✓ (approve) and ✗ (reject) buttons in the actions column. They do the same thing as opening the detail panel and clicking — useful when you’ve already decided and don’t need to read the full application again.
What happens to the applicant
- Approved — they get an email letting them know. The lease you create from their application will eventually arrive at their portal for signing.
- Rejected — they get an email with whatever review message you wrote (if any). If you leave the review message blank, they get a neutral “your application wasn’t selected” notice.
What’s next
- Creating a new lease — finishing the lease that was auto-created on approval.
- Sending an application invite — push a specific person into this queue.