Overview

When Stessa (a Roofstock company) acquired RentPrep, a tenant screening service, it created a strategic opportunity to expand beyond accounting and portfolio tracking — becoming the one tool landlords need to find, screen, and onboard great tenants.

My role was to lead the design of the end-to-end screening experience across two phases: first the landlord-facing initiation flow, then the applicant-facing portal. Sequencing the delivery this way let us get the landlord experience live while refining the applicant side in parallel.

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.

Research and Discovery

The acquisition timeline didn't leave room for direct user interviews or funnel analytics. Rather than treating that as a blocker, I designed an alternative discovery approach.

I audited the screening flows of TurboTenant, Azibo, and RentPrep's original design to identify failure modes and establish a clear design direction grounded in what competitors were getting wrong.

To supplement the competitive audit, I leaned on two internal sources: the RentPrep team's firsthand knowledge of the screening workflow, and internal Stessa employees who were landlords themselves and could validate my assumptions about how decisions were actually made in practice.

Because this was a two-sided flow, I mapped both the landlord and applicant journeys before touching a single screen — capturing actions, thoughts, and emotional state to identify where friction was highest.

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.

01

Modern and Trustworthy

Screening is high-stakes — landlords enter payment info and make legal decisions. The visual language had to feel credible and trustworthy.

02

Distinct, focused steps

Rather than one overwhelming form, I structured the experience as a multi-step flow with a progress bar. Each screen has a single job.

03

Native, not bolted on

The RentPrep acquisition could have resulted in a deep link or iframe. I pushed for full native integration so users never felt like they were leaving Stessa.

Before designing individual screens, I mapped the full user flow for both the landlord and applicant paths. This helped me identify the key branching points early and ensure the experience held together end-to-end before getting into details.

Phase 1: Landlord Flow

Select Screening Package and Submit Request:

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.

Phase 2: Applicant Flow

Outcome

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.

  • 85–95 NPS score - landlords consistently cited the clarity of the results view and the simplified initiation flow as meaningful improvements over their previous workflows

  • 23% increase in applicant screening completion rates - reducing drop-off on the applicant side directly improved the landlord's experience

  • Shipped end-to-end - full coverage across initiation, applicant portal, and results flows across both phases


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.

If I were to revisit this today, I'd push the dashboard from a status overview to something more directive. A landlord managing multiple properties and applicants simultaneously doesn't need a page that just informs them - they need one that guides them.

This is where AI could do meaningful work. Rather than showing all applicants in a flat list, the dashboard could use AI to intelligently surface what needs attention most urgently: a screening that's been pending for 48 hours, an applicant whose report just came back, a payment that's about to process. The key design challenge would be building landlord trust in those prioritizations: showing enough reasoning behind why something is flagged as urgent so the landlord feels in control, not overridden.