Free California Application Screening Fee Receipt

AB 2493 is a choice about your whole vacancy process, not a form to fill in

Start one step before the choice, with who and what § 1950.6 reaches. The section defines its own field: it engages when a landlord or their agent receives a request to rent a residential property, “landlord” means an owner of residential rental property, the screening fee is defined by reference to the rent or lease of residential rental property, and an “applicant” is someone asking to rent a residential housing unit (or a guarantor or cosignor). It also sits in Civil Code chapter 2, “Hiring of Real Property”, whose applicability provision § 1940 applies the chapter to all persons who hire dwelling units located in this state — tenants, lessees, boarders, lodgers and others however denominated — while excluding from “persons who hire” transient occupancy in a hotel, motel, residence club or other facility where that occupancy is or would be taxable under Revenue and Taxation Code § 7280, and occupancy at a hotel or motel where the innkeeper retains a right of access to and control of the unit and offers all five listed services to all residents. The two gates are not identical, and the section’s own definitions are the more direct of them: § 1940 frames chapter applicability around persons who hire, whereas § 1950.6 governs the applicant before any tenancy exists. Subdivision (l) adds a third boundary in a different direction — the section is not intended to preempt provisions or regulations governing the collection of deposits and fees under federal or state housing assistance programs, so a program’s own fee rules are not displaced by it. None of that is a doubt about the duties. On a residential letting by an owner or their agent they bind exactly as set out below; the classification is a question of fact about the property and no page can settle it for you. The two options are genuinely different businesses, and only one of them lets you keep the fees. The first-qualified-applicant route has four conditions, not two, and the two that get dropped are the ones about money. You must provide your screening criteria to the applicant in writing, together with the application form — publishing them on a listing, or having them settled internally, does not discharge that; it is a delivery duty with a named recipient, a required medium and a required moment. Completed applications are then considered against those criteria in the order received, and the first applicant who meets them is approved. Third, an applicant may not be charged a screening fee unless or until their application is actually considered — so on this route you may not take everyone’s money at the front of the queue and work down it. Fourth, where fees are nonetheless collected inadvertently because applications came in concurrently, each applicant whose application is not considered must be refunded within seven days (or, at that applicant’s discretion only, have the fee applied to an application for another unit you offer). What you get in return is a single, narrow retention rule: you are not required to refund an applicant whose application was denied, after consideration, because they did not meet your established screening criteria. Under the alternative, you keep your discretion and pay for it. You may screen everyone, weigh them against each other, and choose — but every applicant you did not select gets their entire screening fee back, regardless of the reason, and there is a clock on it: within 7 days of selecting an applicant for tenancy, or 30 days of when the application was submitted, whichever occurs first. Not the unspent portion; the whole fee. Note which way that clock can run — the thirty-day limb starts at submission, so it can expire before the unit is let. For a landlord filling one unit from a field of applicants, that converts screening from a cost-recovery exercise into a real cost of doing business, and the arithmetic gets worse the more applicants you screen. What the rule removes is the middle position that most landlords were operating. Screening a queue, retaining every fee, and selecting on preference is precisely the practice the amendment addresses. A landlord who continues it has not committed a paperwork error; it has taken fees it is now obliged to return. The practical consequence is that the decision has to be visible in your documents. If you are running first-qualified-applicant, the criteria have to go out in writing with the application form rather than merely being advertised, your applications need an arrival time, and your criteria need to be objective enough that “qualified” is a question with an answer. If you are not, your receipt should tell the applicant they will be refunded in full if they are not selected, and by when. And on either route, two duties run independently of the choice: where a fee has been paid you owe the applicant a copy of the consumer credit report within seven days of receiving it, and if you performed no personal reference check and obtained no credit report you owe back whatever part of the fee you did not use. The record this page generates asks which route you are on for exactly that reason — it is the first question, not a detail.