The Solution to Multiple Application Fees for Renters
by John Lawrence, August 3, 2019
Tyrone Poole was taking a course to become a firefighter in Portland, Oregon. Then his luck turned bad. He fell, had a bad leg injury and ended up in the hospital. He couldn't pay his hospital bills, was evicted from his apartment and had nowhere to go upon being discharged from the hospital.
Oregonlive.com takes up the story:
He couch-surfed for a while. But his friends grew tired of taking care of him. One night, around 10 p.m., a friend told Poole he could no longer stay.
"I grabbed all my stuff and left,'" Poole said. "I was carrying my entire life with me on crutches."
He hobbled a few miles toward a MAX station, each step like walking on glass. By the time he arrived, he could barely stand. He laid down and vomited.
A police officer found him, Poole said, and assumed he'd been drinking. Poole explained his injury, and the cop offered him a ride.
"He would have taken me anywhere," Poole said. "But there were no more places."
The officer drove Poole to the YWCA close to midnight. Poole said the workers weren't happy -- there's a shelter protocol, and everyone else was asleep -- but they pulled out a semi-broken cot and set it up in the gym.
"It was the lowest moment of my entire life," Poole said. "Even the homeless shelter is telling me I shouldn't be there."
From there it was an endless round of applying for apartment rentals. Although the YWCA gave him a voucher for one year's rent in return for working at the Y, Poole couldn't find an apartment. At each one he applied, he had to pay an application fee. For four months the applications were all denied.
Poole tried to tell managers he had a year of guaranteed rent. But they saw his drawbacks: Poole had been evicted while in the hospital. His car and his storage unit had been repossessed. His credit was bad. And because his doctors had yet to clear him for work, he had no income.
Poole knew some property managers take chances, but there was no way to find out who would accept him without applying. Each application cost about $20.
Poole thought there must be a better way. People with bad credit are just throwing their money down a rathole if their credit is bad, and this is the primary criterion a landlord uses to decide whether to rent to someone. You can't discriminate on the grounds of race, ethnicity, religion, national origin or anything else, but you can discriminate on the grounds of poor credit. So a landlord will accept an application along with an application fee from anyone knowing that he will likely not rent to that person. It gets even worse. In El Cajon, where I live, the current rate for an application fee is $25.00 per adult living in the apartment. It is often the case that there is a third adult involved, a mother or a mother-in-law, for example, to help pay the rent . The application must be run on each adult so that is $75.00 upfront in application fees.
Poole's idea was to create an app whereby renters would submit their information and a one time fee. Then the app would match them with criteria from multiple landlords. So that's how the website oneApp was born. Prospective renters could find out immediately which landlords would find their application acceptable and go from there. Poole was lucky that the Portland Economic Development Commission was shifting its focus to black entrepreneurs. He had an idea, but no coding skills, no capital and no business experience. Nevertheless, he impressed the right people and his venture was funded.
In Portland nearly half the city’s residents are renters and the average rent grew by 4.6 percent last year. The median rent price for an apartment in Portland is now $1,879 a month, according to a Zillow analysis. Tyrone has a contract with the City of Portland to provide the services which expedite poor rental applicants in finding an apartment. A one time rental fee of $35.00 matches them with available apartments and the $35.00 is refunded by the landlord on move-in.
Street Roots reported:
The data and information OneApp collects on its apartment listings, including rents and screening criteria, as well as basic demographics on prospective tenants could be a boon to policymakers and housing advocates. Currently, information on Oregon and even Portland’s rental inventory is spotty. Peterson said OneApp has already aggregated a list of nearly 100 different screening criteria landlords and property managers use when evaluating tenants. “You can start to break each category into its own,” he said, such as how many past evictions a particular property management company will consider. The website could also provide data on the average credit score or the average debt that a tenant has and compare it to their income. That data, he said, could help the Portland Housing Bureau, elected officials and policymakers “understand how the market of renters match up with the market of available units.”
The City of Portland has a contract with Tyrone to provide oneApp services to the City of Portland. You can access them from the website of the Portland Housing Bureau. He is also branching out to other cities. Why not San Diego and LA?
