The Velocity Advantage: How Faster Approvals Double Your Applicant Pool and Transform Your Economics

In rental housing, speed doesn't just fill units faster—it fundamentally increases the number of applicants you can actually convert per available unit. Every rental applicant is only available for a limited window. Once they sign a lease elsewhere, they're gone from your pool forever. The faster you approve, the more applicants remain available to you.

According to a recent Zillow consumer trends report, 66% of renters submitted two or more rental applications.  These multi-property applicants move fast. By Day 3, when most properties complete their approvals, nearly half of these high-quality applicants have already signed leases elsewhere,  meaning you need to find 47% more applications per open lease to fill it. 

For property managers spending thousands on marketing to generate leads, avoiding this can mean transformational cost advantage - saving $287k per 1,000 units via lower CAC and vacancy days.

The Shrinking Pool: Timing Determines Your True Market Size

The rental market moves at the speed of the fastest approver, and not all applicants are created equal. The 66% of applicants who apply to multiple properties aren't random—they're typically your most qualified prospects, with relatively high credit scores, easy to verify employment and clean rental histories.

The critical insight: If you're approving on Day 3 (industry standard), you don’t need just 2 applications per open lease to fill it - the industry standard - you actually need 2.9 applications per open lease. By Day 7, you're up to 4.3, since just 20% of qualified applicants remain in the pool.

The Dual Impact: Improved CAC Efficiency and Reduced Vacancy

When you capture more of the multi-property applicant pool through speed, you capture a powerful economic opportunity

1. Improved Customer Acquisition Cost Efficiency

If you are approving on day 3 instead of day 1, you need to find on average 0.93 additional applications to fill the unit. With an average tenancy of 2.5 years that’s an additional 373 applications per 1000 units.

With a Customer Acquisition Cost of $750 on average, each application costs $375 to source. For those 373 applications that comes to $140k of required Customer Acquisition Cost.

2. Saving from Lost Vacancy Days

On average, each application takes 5 days to source and an additional 3 days to approve. That means each application causes an additional 8 days of vacancy per open application.

With an average monthly rent of $1,500, each of those days is a $49 loss of NOI.

That means 2,986 lost vacancy days per 1000 units, or $147,246 of potential NOI savings from improving your approval time.

The Big Picture: $5.7M per 1,000 Units is on the Table

Just improving your average approvals to less than 1 day can yield outsized results at a portfolio level. As the only end to end screening provider, we take the entire process off your hands, processing close to 90% of approvals within  24 hours, faster than anyone else in the market.