Stessa

Applicant Screening for Landlords

Stessa’s screening feature - designed to balance speed, clarity, and credibility in applicant screening.

Overview

Independent landlords face two persistent problems when screening rental applicants:

  • Fragmentation: Credit checks, background checks, and income verification lived in separate tools. Landlords had to manage multiple logins, reconcile separate reports, and make decisions without a unified view of an applicant.

  • Time pressure: Every day a unit sits between applicants costs money. A slow or confusing screening flow delays decisions, and in competitive rental markets, hesitation can mean losing a qualified tenant to another landlord.

As part of its mission to streamline rental property management, Stessa acquired and integrated RentPrep (an applicant-screening, background and credit check service) to provide applicant screening for landlords.

My role was to lead the design of the end-to-end screening experience: embedding RentPrep's services natively into Stessa while making the flow feel simple, trustworthy, and fast for independent landlords.

Research and Discovery

Ideally, this project would have included direct interviews with landlords who had previously used RentPrep, alongside funnel analytics showing where users dropped off. Due to timing constraints and data access limitations at the time of the acquisition, neither was available.

Instead, I focused on a competitive audit, auditing screening flows from comparable tools and direct competitors such as Turbotenant, Azibo, and the original RentPrep design.

Through a competitive audit of Turbotenant and Azibo, I identified two distinct failure modes:

  • Turbotenant suffered from visual clutter and an outdated UI that created cognitive overhead for landlords trying to make quick decisions

  • Azibo had a more modern aesthetic, but collapsed the screening invite flow and the results dashboard onto the same page — making it difficult to establish clear visual hierarchy and task priority.

  • Both competitors did not offer a landlord pay option at the time, which gave Stessa a competitive advantage in attracting landlords who wanted more control over the screening process.

Design Decisions

This informed my design direction: create an experience that felt modern and trustworthy, while breaking the flow into distinct, focused steps — from initiating a screening request, to reviewing the report, to approving an applicant and moving toward a lease.

Select Screening Package and Submit Request:

Competitors handled the screening flow in two problematic ways: Turbotenant crammed everything into a single long form, while Azibo embedded the flow directly within the dashboard page, both making it difficult to establish clear task priority.

Since Stessa's flow included a more complex feature where landlords could choose to pay for screening themselves, which required capturing payment details, selecting a screening package, and entering applicant information, I broke the experience into a multi-step flow with a progress bar. This gave landlords a clear sense of how far along they were in the process and made each step feel focused and manageable.

View application + screening details:

For the dashboard, I opted for a clean table layout showing all applicants alongside their screening and application statuses. In retrospect, I'd push this further - the dashboard should be more directional, surfacing urgent items, recent updates, and clear next steps so landlords know exactly where to focus when they land on the page.

The applicant details page was adapted from an existing rental applications screen designed by another team. I refreshed the visual design to align with the screening context while maintaining consistency with the broader Stessa product.

Outcome

The feature launched covering the entire screening journey. Landlords no longer had to piece together information from separate tools, and the feedback we got back reflected that, and people found the results view easy to read and the initiation flow much more manageable than what they'd used before.

  • Faster screening turnaround: Consolidating the workflow into Stessa reduced the time landlords spent managing screening across multiple tools.

  • Positive user feedback: Landlords cited the clarity of the results view and the simplified initiation flow as meaningful improvements over previous workflows.

  • Shipped end-to-end:The feature launched with full coverage across the initiation, applicant-facing, and results flows.

Reflection

This project taught me a lot about designing under real constraints. Without access to user interviews or funnel data at the time of the acquisition, I leaned heavily on competitive research and product intuition, which got us to a solid v1, but also left some questions unanswered.

If I were to revisit this today, I'd want to make the dashboard more directional. Right now it gives landlords a status overview, but it doesn't do enough to surface what's urgent or what needs attention next. A landlord managing multiple properties and applicants simultaneously needs the page to guide them, not just inform them.