The application in hand meets your criteria. Three more showings are booked for the weekend. You can approve now, or you can hold the unit and see who else turns up. Most landlords make this call on instinct, which is expensive in one direction and risky in the other.
Price the delay before you weigh the applicants
A held unit costs the monthly rent divided by about 30, every day, and that money does not come back. At $2,100 a month, a day costs roughly $70. Holding from Tuesday to a decision the following Monday costs about $420. Holding through a second weekend because the first one disappointed costs about $840.
Now price what you are holding out for. The rent is fixed: it is in the ad, and the applicant in hand has agreed to it. A different applicant at the same rent pays you the same money. So waiting does not buy income. It buys a change in your own estimate of risk, and you are paying $70 a day for that change.
That framing settles more of these calls than any screening tool. If you would raise the rent on the next round, you are not choosing between applicants at all, you are repricing the unit, and that is a separate decision with its own timing.
What you are allowed to weigh
In Ontario the permissible grounds for choosing a tenant are written down. O. Reg. 290/98 under the Human Rights Code says a landlord may request credit references and rental history, may request authorization for a credit check, and may consider those "alone or in any combination" when selecting or refusing a prospective tenant. Income information sits under a tighter rule: you may request it only if you also request the items above, and you may consider it only together with all the other information you obtained.
Read that as a closed list. When two complete applications both clear your criteria and you reach for a reason to prefer one, check that the reason is on the list. Tone on the phone, how the person presented at the showing, and a feeling about whether they will stay are not on it.
Two common tiebreakers are worse than useless. The Ontario Human Rights Commission's guide for landlords states that a lack of rental or credit history should not be viewed negatively, which rules out the usual reflex against newcomers and first-time renters. It also notes you can ask for a guarantor only if you require one of every tenant, not of the applicants who make you uneasy.
The grounds themselves vary by province. British Columbia's Human Rights Code lists lawful source of income among them, alongside family status, age and the rest. A preference you could not write into the ad is a preference you cannot apply at the decision either.
Four questions that decide it
1. Is anything genuinely outstanding?
There is a difference between an incomplete file and a complete file you are unsure about. A reference who has not called back, an unsigned page, an employment letter still coming: those resolve in hours, and they justify a short hold with a deadline attached. A complete file plus a hunch does not.
2. How deep is the pipeline, counted properly?
Count confirmed showings, not inquiries. A booked Saturday with four confirmations is a real pipeline. Eleven messages and one confirmed time is not, and a no-show rate you have never measured is not a plan.
3. Which way is your market moving?
CMHC's Rental Market Report put the national purpose-built apartment vacancy rate at 3.1 per cent for 2025, up from 2.2 per cent the year before, and found that rents paid by new tenants fell in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto and Halifax as vacancy rose. In a market loosening like that, the next applicant is less likely to improve on the one you already have, and the cost of the days you spend finding out is unchanged.
4. Would you take this applicant if nobody else existed?
If yes, approve. If no, the application does not meet your criteria and you should decline it today rather than park it as a fallback. If you cannot answer, your criteria are not written clearly enough, and the fix belongs upstream in the ad and the application form.
The rule, in order
- Write the criteria before the listing goes up. One page: proof of income you will accept, references you will call, pet and smoking terms, the move-in window, deposits. Same page for every applicant.
- Publish the criteria with the ad. Applicants who cannot meet them self-select out, which costs you nothing and saves the showing.
- Timestamp each application as complete, not as received. Completeness is the queue position.
- Approve the first complete application that meets the criteria, the same day it is complete.
- When one item is outstanding, approve conditionally in writing, name the item, set a deadline in hours, and say what happens if it passes.
- Write one line per decision against the criteria. This is what you will need months later, and it is also what stops the decision drifting toward feel.
The second step does more work than it looks. Criteria that live only in your head get applied unevenly without anyone intending it, because the standard moves with how the day went. Criteria on the ad get applied the same way at nine in the morning and six at night.
Close out the applicants you do not take
Tell them the same day. An applicant waiting on you is holding their own search open, and the ones you turn down slowly are the ones who stop applying to your buildings. A one-line decline that names the criterion is enough.
Then deal with the file. A declined application is a stack of credit and identity data you now hold with no tenancy behind it, and keeping it forever is its own exposure, which we covered in declined rental applications are a data retention problem. Keep the decision record, retire the underlying documents on a schedule you set once.
The landlords who agonize over this decision are usually trying to do screening after the fact, at the point where two names are in front of them. Screening belongs at the top, in the criteria. Once the criteria are good, the choice between two applicants who both clear them is not a choice worth $70 a day.