What Buildium’s Tenant Screening Covers — and the One Check Worth Adding Alongside It

If you screen applicants through Buildium, you’re already ahead of most independent landlords. Buildium’s screening — powered by TransUnion — pulls a credit report, a criminal background check, and eviction history, and lays it out cleanly so you can make the call. It’s a genuinely solid foundation, and for much of what you need, it’s all you need. There’s just one part of the picture it isn’t built to cover — and it’s worth knowing exactly where that line sits.

What Buildium’s screening is built to do (and does well)

Buildium answers a specific, important question: what is this applicant’s history? — credit, criminal record, past evictions. That’s the backbone of responsible screening, and Buildium makes it fast and consistent. None of what follows is a knock on the platform; this is exactly what a property-management system should do, and it does it well.

The one thing it isn’t designed to check — and why

Here’s the natural boundary. Buildium’s screening looks at the applicant’s record. It doesn’t — because no property-management platform is built to — independently verify that the income documents an applicant uploads are genuine, or that the employer on the pay stub is a real, operating company. That’s not a flaw in Buildium; it’s simply a different job. Credit, criminal, and eviction data come from established bureaus. Confirming that a specific pay stub wasn’t made on a template site, and that “Acme Payroll LLC” is an actual business with a real address and phone, is a separate kind of check — one that sits outside what any screening platform is meant to do.

Why that piece matters more than it used to

It used to be safe to take a pay stub at face value. Not anymore. AI tools and template sites now produce a clean, correctly-calculated pay stub in under a minute — no editing marks, nothing for the eye to catch. And a stub for an invented employer passes straight through, because there was never a real company to check it against. Your credit/criminal/eviction screening won’t flag it — that’s not what it looks at. An applicant’s record can be spotless while the income is fiction.

How to close it — right alongside Buildium

The good news: you don’t change anything about how you screen. You add one step, at the one spot Buildium leaves open. Take the pay stub the applicant already uploaded, and run it through an independent document-and-employer check: is the document genuine, does the pay math hold, and is the employer a real, registered business — with a real address, phone, and web presence? Put that next to your Buildium credit/criminal/eviction report, and you’ve got the complete picture: the applicant’s history and the truth of their income.

That’s what ProofSweep does. It works alongside any Buildium plan — no integration, no upgrade, no API — you just upload the pay stub and get a plain-English report back, usually within 24 hours. It’s not a background check, and it’s not a replacement for your screening. It’s the one piece that finishes it.

Buildium tells you who the applicant is. ProofSweep confirms the income is real. Together, that’s a complete screen. Check a pay stub with ProofSweep.