Aptoria applies the screening criteria you set consistently, then can move a clearly qualified applicant forward within your limits. A denial is never automatic: you review the information, make the decision, and complete the required adverse-action step when a screening report informed the outcome.
Approvals can be automatic; denials cannot
Screening in Aptoria pulls the standard applicant checks — credit, background, and income or rent-to-income signals — through a screening provider and returns a result you can act on. You set the criteria that matter to you up front, applied the same way to every applicant, which is both good practice and what fair-housing law expects.
Applying the same criteria to everyone is not cosmetic; it is how you stay on the right side of federal Fair Housing rules. Aptoria runs the same check the same way for each applicant, so your decisions rest on the criteria you set, not on anything you are not permitted to consider.
Approvals can be automatic; denials cannot
An applicant who clears your criteria can be approved within the thresholds you set, so a clean, qualified application can move forward without waiting on you. That is the routine side of screening the agent is allowed to handle.
A denial is different, and this is deliberate. Denying an applicant is on the blocked floor — it can never run autonomously. Federal law, the Fair Credit Reporting Act, requires a human decision plus a proper adverse-action notice whenever a tenant-screening report factors into turning someone down. The agent surfaces a borderline or failing application for your review, but the decision to deny, and the notice that has to follow, stays with you.
When you decline an applicant based in whole or in part on a screening report, federal law requires an adverse-action notice: it tells the applicant the decision was informed by a report, identifies the reporting agency, and explains their right to dispute the information and get a free copy. Aptoria keeps this a guided, human-confirmed step rather than an automatic send, so the notice goes out correctly and the decision is attributable to you.
Every screening decision, and the notice that follows a denial, is captured in your audit trail. That is what lets you show a decision was made on your stated criteria if it is ever questioned.