Property Management: Online Rental Applications Must Be Encrypted

If you have ever bought anything online, you will notice a little lock symbol that appears on your browser when you enter a secure shopping cart. When you click on the lock, a window pops up that shows the information about the company providing the SSL Certificate for that particular website. SSL stands for secure socket layer and indicates that this shopping cart is encrypted and is safe for you to enter your credit card information.

Some well known companies that provide SSL Certificates are Thawte, VeriSign, and GeoTrust. You will see the name of the company that is providing the encryption for this website and the date their security certificate expires. You should not enter any sensitive information if this security certificate does not exist.

Now take everything we just discussed and transfer the principles to the realm of an online rental application. All the needs for security and encryption still exist and many web developers or property management companies are unaware of this fact.

It is a good business practice to give prospective renters the opportunity to access a rental application through your website. There are 2 basic ways you can do this. The first is take your existing rental application and convert it to a .pdf file that customers can print, fill out, and either mail or bring in to your office. Then you do not have to worry about any of the security issues mentioned above.

If you do opt for an online form for gathering your application information, then we make only one recommendation. The form should be processed on a secure, encrypted page (with the lock symbol) and the information should be written to a database on your server. The form or information should not be sent through an e-mail to your inbox. The reason for this is that e-mail is not encrypted either and can be intercepted. Once again, you do not want sensitive information to fall into the wrong hands. That is why we recommend that the application information be written to your server and viewed through a secure administration panel.

This option costs more to implement than a simple .pdf application that can be printed out. It is important that you realize you have a responsibility as a property management company to handle prospective tenants' personal information with the utmost care and professional standards.

Jim is a web developer and programmer who works with his wife, Cari, in their full service small business web development company. We invite you to take a look at our portfolio of property management web sites and other web applications that we have developed. We specialize in serving property management companies that want to market and manage their rental listings online.