AI-Powered Tenant Screening Worries HUD, Fair Housing Advocates

The promise behind tenant screening technology is simple: By automating the process of sifting through apartment applications and performing background checks, landlords can quickly weed out prospective tenants they consider too risky to rent to — people with shaky finances, cloudy rental history or concerning criminal records.

By streamlining a lot of paperwork-intensive detective work, these computerized services — part of a flourishing field of real estate industry tools known as proptech — are billed as a means of cutting down on evictions, fending off fraud and reducing costs for owners and tenants alike.

“It’s just like selecting students for admission to a university and ...