93.3% of apartment operators are dealing with fraud right now.
That's not a scare tactic—it's the headline finding from the National Multifamily Housing Council's (NMHC) 2024 Pulse Survey on Operational Impact of Rental Application Fraud and Bad Debt. If you manage a multifamily portfolio today, fraud isn't a tail risk anymore—it's a baseline operating cost and one of the top challenges you're facing.
And it's accelerating. 70.7% of respondents reported an increase in fraudulent applications and payments over the same period. This isn't a handful of bad actors slipping through the cracks. It's a systemic, growing problem across the industry.
What kind of fraud affects property managers?
Here's where the exposure sits:
- 84.3% of operators saw applicants falsifying or fabricating pay stubs, employment references, or other income documentation — by far the most common tactic
- 80% observed applicants misrepresenting information on their applications more broadly
- 70% reported identity theft or the use of fraudulent ID documents
- 67.1% experienced unauthorized cohabitants, illegal subletting, or other lease-evasion behavior
- 62.9% dealt with fraudulent checks or other fraudulent payment methods
Falsified income documentation leads by a wide margin, which matters—it's the single easiest point of failure to close, and it's exactly where automated verification technology has matured fastest.
What is bad debt?
Bad debt is money owed to a business or lender that is deemed irrecoverable and will never be paid. For property managers, here's what that means:
In 2023, property operators were required to write off an average of nearly $4.2 million in bad debt over a 12-month period, with a median of $800,000. Of that total, approximately a quarter (24.5%) was attributable specifically to nonpayment tied to fraudulent applications.
On average, that's over $1 million per operator, per year, traceable directly back to fraud at the point of application—before a single eviction filing, legal fee, or turn cost even enters the picture.
How eviction filings contribute to fraud
Bad debt is only the first cost center. Fraud also drives the eviction pipeline, and evictions are expensive in ways that compound. On average, 23.8% of eviction filings across respondents to the NMHC survey were linked to fraudulent applications and the subsequent failure to pay rent.
Part of what makes this so persistent is court backlog. Courts are often too backed up to hear eviction cases quickly, which means a fraudulent tenant can occupy (and not pay for) a unit for months before a case is even heard. Every one of those months is additional lost rent stacked on top of the eventual legal and turn costs.
Why this is a portfolio-level problem, not a property-level one
It's tempting to treat fraud as a leasing-office issue—something site teams handle with better screening. But the numbers say otherwise. When 93.3% of operators are affected, when the bad debt hit averages in the millions, and when nearly a quarter of evictions trace back to fraud at the application stage, this is a portfolio-wide financial exposure that belongs on the same risk register as interest rate risk or occupancy risk. It shows up in your bad debt line, your eviction costs, your legal spend, and your unit turn timelines—all at once, across every property.
The trend line is also worth sitting with: fraud didn't level off after the pandemic-era eviction moratoriums lifted. Instead, it accelerated, fueled by more sophisticated tactics and, increasingly, AI-generated documentation that's harder for a leasing agent to catch by eye. Manual review, no matter how well-trained your site staff is, is fighting an increasingly automated problem with human-scale tools.
Where the fix actually starts
The bulk of the fraud identified in rental applications isn't identity theft or organized crime; rather, it's the much more common, much more fixable problem of falsified income and employment documentation. That's the highest-volume entry point for fraud, and it's also the one that's most straightforward to close with the right verification approach.
This is where a platform like MeasureOne's property management solution fits directly into the problem this data describes. Instead of relying on a leasing agent to manually eyeball a pay stub or bank statement—the exact vector behind the largest share of reported fraud —MeasureOne verifies income and employment by connecting directly to an applicant's payroll or bank account, or by using deterministic, automated document processing when a direct connection isn't available. Because the data comes straight from the source rather than a document the applicant controls, it closes off the falsification vector that NMHC's survey identifies as the single most common form of fraud in the industry.
But that's not all. MeasureOne also:
- Streamlines compliance and insurance: Tracking renters insurance is effortless with MeasureOne. The platform accesses and verifies renters insurance data directly from the insurance carrier. MeasureOne provides real-time monitoring of policy statuses, so your team never has to manually chase down renewals or expired policies again.
- Improves and simplifies integrations: MeasureOne seamlessly integrates with your existing property management software via a robust API. Because the data is accessed conveniently and flexibly via direct connections, intelligent document processing, and/or monitoring, your tenant screening process is faster and more accurate.