MoveZen’s Fair to All Approach to Application Processing: The Fees We Didn’t Collect: Our Transparent Rental Data

During the COVID rental rush, and even now, we’ve frequently been accused of doing what many do. The charge is that we hoover up application fees for profit, instead of putting the goal of filling our properties first, front and center. We take great pride in how efficiently we handle applications. We created this uniquely transparent public data to prove that we’ve had our local communities’ best interest at heart from the beginning.

Two Numbers Anyone Can Understand

The first number is 2.8. That’s how many applications, on average, it took us to lease a home from 2019 through September 2026. The typical home drew 2, and that held in every single year. Even in 2021 and 2022, the two craziest years of the COVID rental rush, our average came in right around 3. It’s impossible to view that in any way other than this: application fees are nothing close to a priority for us.

The second number is 52%. In 52% of the homes we leased, the first household that applied got the home. We’re incredibly proud of that.

Every MoveZen number in this article comes from our own application records, counted with a strict, published method. An application means everyone who applied together for one home, so a couple applying together counts once.

Tap through the years below. The busiest single home we leased from 2020 through 2024 drew 15 applications.

The COVID Rush, and the Money on the Table

During the insanity of COVID, it didn’t take us long to see that some companies and landlords were bringing in $2,000 or more per listing in application fees alone. In our North and South Carolina markets during the COVID rental rush, that was easily attained. In the beginning, we looked at that profit potential and thought it would be easy not to chase it, except for the fact that so many of our competitors were. It’s hard to compete when you leave tons of money on the table that others are happily benefiting from. That’s a common theme for our company.

We want to be clear about how strange those two years were. Things moved so fast, and got so insane, that they’re almost impossible to compare with normal experience. You didn’t have to actively try to rip people off to make a huge application fee profit back then. We quickly noticed that renters were getting frantic and fearful about finding a home, and we actively worked against the fee haul with prices and caps.

How We Kept the Number Low

Every time we listed a home back then, we had two choices. We could respond to the fact that the market was clearly scorching with the fairest market tool we had available: price. Or we could price it in line with what seemed logical and normal, and if we wound up bringing in 30 or more applications, well, we did our best. We chose to use prices to throttle the emotional pain, the financial pain, and the frantic battles renters were going through at almost every turn.

Despite pricing our rentals at stratospheric levels, we almost never caught heat for it. Renters seemed to understand that the home was out of their range. That was a transparent fact, and they needed to look elsewhere. Then, by systematically reducing from those extreme highs, we created an auction-like atmosphere. Each reduction tended to attract a very small number of renters. They were happy to pay that price for the security of getting a quality home, without a borderline fistfight during the application process. (It works less well on low-quality rentals, something we’ve advised against our entire existence.) This method is obvious in the stats. It saved our local communities literally hundreds of thousands of dollars in application fees over those two hottest years.

We didn’t just use prices as our limiting factor. Once we saw what a problem it was becoming, we also capped the number of applications we accepted. We took them in batches and cut off processing new ones. If someone from the first batch was approved, which by far was the most common outcome, we refunded everyone who came after. We always refund applications we don’t process, and since we capped how many we’d process at one time, that was a lot of refunds.

There was another problem. A lot of the most careless applications were credit card fraud, which ran rampant. Our method saved the broader financial system a lot of money and headaches too. We also approved an extremely low number of fraudulent applications. We were quick to respond to that issue, and our overall methods already did a great job of keeping those applications from coming in at all.

The only possible way to keep our average number of applications per home so low is fair rules for accepting and processing applications, applied consistently, combined with expert pricing. A big part of that pricing is starting high and reducing systematically to create that auction-like atmosphere. It works extremely well on most quality homes, especially these days.

What It Means for Owners

The benefits to renters are obvious. But what about the owner whose $2,500-a-month home gets priced at $2,000, by a manager who knows owners can’t possibly understand what rents should be in a market that insane? That owner loses at least $6,000 in the first year ($500 a month x 12). The manager, on the other hand, might bring in 30 applications at almost no cost, assuming they find a good one early and stop screening. Our average is about 3, so that’s 27 extra applications. 27 x $70 = $1,890 in additional application fees, which is more than most managers would net managing an average rental for an entire year.

It was very common for managers and landlords to price homes 30% below market. In booming Sunbelt cities, you could expect 50 applications for a nice home even if you moved relatively fast. Move slowly and it could be much higher, and some did. Now consider doing that several hundred times over two years, which is easy for any decent-sized company. Many companies probably pulled in 30 applications per listing on average during the craziest two years. We suspect almost no company would dare publish this kind of data.

We also use one unusual strategy. If we have to decline a few applications in a row, we amp up the pressure on the owner to reduce the price one or two small times. That’s by far the best way to place great residents fast. It cuts down on the low-odds applications. Smart renters are very smart with their finances. They know they can be easily approved, and they look for exactly the kind of value this method provides. And it gets income flowing now rather than maybe later. In our experience, if you’re getting several marginal applications, you’re probably one small reduction away from a very good one.

That was true then, and it’s especially true in today’s tough market. The biggest wins usually come from filling the home fast with a high-quality resident who’s more likely to stay put. By trading rate income for occupancy income, owners can set better standards for which applications they accept, and over time that makes a huge difference. This method works wonders to keep the best renters in place longer.

How We Price Today

We still use a variation of this method. We advise owners to set the starting rate 10 to 15% above market rent and reduce systematically, sometimes weekly. We target about 45 total days vacant and reduce accordingly. This gets homes off the market at fair prices fast, so they don’t linger at high prices, which tend to attract desperate renters looking for desperate landlords. It works extremely well, and owners who take our advice, as most do, see the benefits. Renters do too, as the data shows. That sets up a rare win-win-win, something we consider ourselves the best at uncovering.

Free Data for Journalists, Researchers, and Anyone Curious

We’re opening up historic rental data from most of North Carolina and much of South Carolina, going back to 2019 in most cases. Journalists, data scientists, and anyone else can use it free. We’ll launch the full data sets and methodology within two weeks and link them here, starting with our application processing data. Later we’ll add anonymous cash flow performance data, renewal statistics, and security deposit charge statistics.

For anyone who plans to work with the numbers, here’s what the first release contains:

Soon we’ll also publish extensive data on our security deposit charge methods. Much like how we handle applications, we feel our stats will prove to be industry leading, obviously fair, extremely heavily invested in, and ultimately a win-win for owners and renters. It’s one piece of an overall approach that’s now becoming mainstream: profit through renter satisfaction, by running a Marriott-like model, not a Motel 6 one. We use even more deeply thought-out strategies to run one of the fairest deposit charge procedures in the industry.

We’ll also publish extensive data on our renewal statistics. We recognized something back then. In a combative world exploding with sophisticated new fraud, with repair costs inflating at an extreme pace, a proven good renter was worth their weight in gold. You should pull out every possible stop to avoid having to test the waters to find a new one.

Want the data and the follow-up articles as they come out? Get our rental market news.

Why We’re Showing This Now

We did all of this with no expectation that it would ever seriously benefit us. We watched hundreds of thousands of dollars get left on the table. All the while, renters still accused us daily of doing exactly what we’d spent massive effort avoiding. We figured we’d never really be able to prove how hard we worked to be fair to our communities, back then and since our founding. Modern AI tools gave us that opportunity, and we couldn’t be happier to present our story. We think it’s compelling. And it puts to bed forever the myth that MoveZen would ever accept a policy as one-sided as making application fees a priority in our business, even if many others do.

We didn’t use AI to post slop our customers have to digest, or to force them to work with robots. We put it to work crunching our raw data, results, methods, strategies, and ideas. Then we built the tools needed to show the benefits they’ve delivered to us, our communities, and our customers.

This is the overview. Three more articles will follow, each going deeper for one audience: renters, property owners, and the journalists and researchers who want to use the data.