Identity verification for property managers

A rental application usually arrives as a name, a form and a promise. Before you hand over keys, the useful question is simple: is this person who they say they are? Identity verification answers that one question, separately from credit checks, references and background screening, which stay their own steps.

What to check, and what not to conflate

Identity verification confirms the applicant holds a genuine government ID and that the live person on camera matches the photo on it. It does not check credit history, rental history or criminal record — those are separate services, and RentKey, for example, runs identity verification and screening as distinct steps rather than one blended score. Keeping them separate matters: an applicant can have a genuine ID and a weak credit file, or vice versa, and conflating the two into one number hides the reason for a decision.

• Document check: the government-issued photo ID (driver's licence, passport, PR card or provincial ID) is read front and back, with the barcode and any machine-readable zone cross-checked against the printed fields.
• Face match: the applicant's live photo is compared against the document portrait, reported against a fixed decision line.
• Liveness: a short guided challenge confirms a real person is present, not a photo or a screen.
• Fraud signals: anti-spoof, deepfake and document tamper checks run on every application, each reported on its own.

What the applicant actually does

The applicant opens a link (or scans a QR code if they started on a desktop) and completes the whole thing on their own phone: photograph the front and back of their ID, then a short liveness check and a selfie. It takes a few minutes. You never see the raw images unless you deliberately go looking; you see the result — a set of per-field verdicts — delivered by a signed webhook. The ID images are purged automatically on a short timer, seven days by default, so you are not accumulating a growing archive of scanned licences you have no ongoing reason to hold.

Keeping a record without keeping the ID forever

If a tenant later disputes a decision, you (the landlord) can point to the verification outcome recorded in the Activity Ledger through your Trust Ledger integration, an append-only record enforced by the database. There is no applicant-facing "who looked at my information" view today. That gives you something to point to that isn't "trust us": a searchable entry showing what happened and when, that persists even after the source ID image is long gone.

Getting started

Most teams start in the sandbox, which is never billed, to see the applicant flow and the result shape before committing to anything. From there it's a REST API call to create a session, a link or QR code for the applicant, and a webhook back to you when it's done — no separate mobile app to build.