Most landlords over-weight the credit score and under-weight the reference call. Reversing that is the single biggest improvement you can make to your screening.
What to look at
Income relative to rent. A common rule of thumb is rent at or under 30% of gross income. Treat it as a starting point, not a cutoff. See the legal note below before you use it as a filter.
Employment stability. Length of service and whether the role is permanent matters more than the job title.
Credit report. Look past the number to the pattern. A 640 with clean recent history and an old written-off student account is a very different applicant from a 640 trending downwards with recent collections.
The previous landlord reference, and actually call it. Ask open questions: why are they leaving, how did they leave the unit, were there ever late payments, would you rent to them again. This is where the real information is.
Consistency across the file. Does the stated income match the pay stubs? Does the employment history match the reference? Discrepancies matter more than any single weak number.
The most common form of application fraud is a friend answering the phone as the previous landlord. Cross-check the name against the property's ownership, call a number you found rather than only the one supplied, and ask questions a real landlord would know the answer to.
Ontario's Human Rights Code prohibits refusing a tenant on the basis of race, ancestry, place of origin, colour, ethnic origin, citizenship, creed, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, marital status, family status, disability, or receipt of public assistance. That includes refusing an applicant because they have children.
Ontario Regulation 290/98 permits you to consider income information, but the Human Rights Commission's position is that it may not be used on its own to screen applicants, and rigid rent-to-income ratios applied as a hard cutoff have been found discriminatory. Use income as one factor alongside credit, references, and a guarantor, not as a gate.
You also cannot require a Social Insurance Number, and cannot demand a deposit beyond first and last month's rent.
Screening sits directly on top of human rights law, and getting it wrong is expensive. If you're unsure whether a criterion is permissible, ask a paralegal who practises in this area before you apply it.
A practical order of operations
- Take complete applications only; an incomplete file tells you something
- Review income, credit, and references together, as a picture
- Call both references before you decide
- Where the file is thin, ask about a guarantor rather than declining
- Keep notes on why you chose whom you chose