Leaders from Morgan Properties, Kane, Windsor Communities, and Plaid unpack how fraud is evolving in a digital leasing environment, and what operators can do to stay ahead.

SCOTTSDALE, AZ — Today, 93% of multifamily operators report experiencing fraud, with 70% seeing increases year over year.

The good news: AI technology makes it easier and more efficient to flag risky behavior. But the bad news is AI turned what used to be an obviously bad photoshop job into polished, scalable attacks, forcing operators to rethink screening from the ground up. 

Property management leaders Sarah Allwardt, Director of Marketing and Resident Experience, at Kane Realty (6,000 units, split evenly owner-operator and third-party-managed), Nate Thompson, Director of Resident Qualifications, at Morgan Properties (No. 2 on the NMHC Top Owners list, 110,000 units), and Marcy Bardenwerper, AVP Strategic Operations at GID/Windsor (No. 19 on the NMHC Top Owners, 57,000 units) joined by fintech expert Jackie Endres, Head of Enterprise + Fintech Partnerships at Plaid, to discuss the role of targeted friction in this new era of AI and fraud prevention. 

The biggest challenge for operators is mitigating fraud risk without breaking the prospect experience because fraud isn’t binary and the motives behind individuals varies. 

The operators getting it right aren’t choosing between speed and security, they’re redesigning their workflows to deliver both with empathy. 

By moving verification earlier, supporting onsite teams with a specialized centralized applications screening team, and applying friction only where risk actually exists, teams are speeding up approvals for qualified renters while mitigating risk before it happens.

The fight against fraud is defined by how well operators balance trust and verification. AI is accelerating both sides, enabling fraud at scale while also helping detect anomalies, flag risk, and eliminate manual work. 

Poll: What is the biggest fraud-related challenge for your organization today?

State of multifamily fraud in 2026

Fraud is not new in multifamily. But in recent years, not only has fraud increased, but it has become harder to spot. 

As Head of Enterprise + Fintech Partnerships at Plaid, Jackie Endres works across financial services, housing, and lending, giving her a front-row view into how fraud is evolving across industries.

“Crime used to be easier to spot,” Endres said. “It’s a product that’s coming at scale, and multifamily is actually in the crosshairs. Multifamily runs on speed and volume. That’s what makes it work, but it’s also what makes it the target.”

Now, one in five documents screened by Funnel have medium to high risk of fraud.

“A quarter of all evictions were tied to fraud applications,” Endres said. “Across the Plaid Network, we are seeing the same thing. Anywhere where you are relying on PDFs and screenshots for screening decisions, [risk is] coming for you.” 

And the impact extends beyond operations. As fraud becomes more prevalent, the cost of managing that risk often shows up elsewhere, like in pricing, in process, and in housing access for qualified renters.

The balance, though, is protecting your assets from risk without ruining the experience for the good ones. 

Kane: Competing with every experience, not just apartments

For Kane Realty, the benchmark for fraud prevention isn’t other operators—it’s every other experience their renters interact with.

Focused in the Raleigh, N.C. area, Kane manages roughly 6,000 units across a mix of owned and third-party communities. And in a market where expectations are shaped by seamless digital experiences everywhere else, multifamily can’t afford to lag behind.

“We are not just competing with the communities in our area,” Allwardt said. “We are competing with every other product and service our customers interact with that offers a great experience.”

That’s where fraud prevention becomes a balancing act.

In most industries, the experience is optimized for the majority of good intentions, even if a small number take advantage. Multifamily has historically done the opposite, building processes around edge cases and forcing every renter through them.

And when that happens, often the qualified renters feel it first.

“When you’re at a restaurant and a customer complains about food, most are not going to make that customer fill out 45 pages of documentation to prove that they didn’t just come in that day looking for a free meal, right? But in multifamily, the risk is just too high,” Allwardt said. “There is no minimum threshold that we can just like, okay, well, we’re good with a few fraudsters looking at our communities in exchange for making the experience better. We have to overhaul the whole process.”

After implementing FunnelSecure, Kane’s total incoming applications rose 25% year-over-year, and the team still accelerated approvals, with a 49% increase in smooth application approvals. 

At the same time, applications requiring additional verification dropped 30% and delivered decisions 47% faster.

“It’s a difficult market for all of us and every lease counts, so we want to make sure we’re not slowing down the process for those who should be getting into our properties,” Allwardt said. “So when we partnered with the Funnel team [with Online Leasing]… our application approval speed improved 47% as well. By embedding that smarter risk intelligence into the process, it proves that strong screening doesn’t have to create unnecessary roadblocks.”

Windsor: Catch fraud earlier, move faster everywhere else

For Windsor, that meant gathering key screening information earlier in the journey so the process runs smoother and teams aren’t stuck chasing documents after the fact.

Operating a large national portfolio, Windsor/GID is ranked No. 20 on the NMHC Top Owners list with approximately 56,000 units. As AVP of Strategic Operations, Marcy Bardenwerper saw firsthand how managing the application process can radically change the time to lease. 

“It really puts the ownership on us to educate the applicant before they even sit down to apply,” Bardenwerper said. “Let’s talk about your situation, what you’re going to have to gather, what credentials you need to have ready to go. It makes the process as smooth as possible, and we’ve really seen the numbers show it.”

Windsor’s application team cut approval times from 4.5 days to under two days, while roughly 93% of ID Verification attempts through Funnel’s Online Leasing screening solution sailed through without human intervention. Of the 7% that were flagged, a trained expert managed the application. 

Instead of slowing everyone down, the process now does the opposite: qualified renters move through faster, while friction slows down risky behavior before fraud can become bad debt.

After implementing FunnelSecure, in Q1 of 2025, Windsor protected an estimated $2.6 million in revenue by flagging risky applications.

But fraud doesn’t look the same across every market, and the way you apply friction shouldn’t either. Renter expectations, income types, and even what “normal” looks like can vary widely from one market to the next.

Bardenwerper recalled a learning experience where vastly different markets were running the same proof of income requirements, producing mixed results. In markets like Atlanta, conversions remained steady as proof of income requirements are typically standard when applying in the area. In other markets, however, the added friction created an unnecessary drop-off.

Windsor took it as an opportunity to understand what their individual communities needed. 

“That’s the benefit of having a diverse pilot,” Bardenwerper said. “We really had to listen to them and take advantage of that feedback loop. We’ve really learned that first of all, you have to listen to your on-site teams. It’s not a one-size-fits-all.”

Instead of forcing consistency across the portfolio, they started dialing requirements up or down based on performance and feedback.

“You have to let data drive your decisions, and sometimes it means making a pivot and making a change. That’s where we landed,” Bardenwerper said. “Right now we have 60% using proof of income, 40% using stated income, and we just know that we’ll continue looking at the data and let that drive our position.”

Morgan: Designing the “fast lane” for qualified renters 

Morgan Properties, the No. 2 on the NMHC Top Owners list for 2026 with more than 100,000 units across 22 states, approached fraud prevention by first investing in consistency. Before any technology or tactical change, the team centralized application screening across 50 communities, routing decisions through a specialized team operating against standardized, objective criteria rather than distributing judgment across individual onsite staff. 

That consistency matters at Morgan’s scale. In a portfolio where 18.6% of renters ultimately sign a lease at a different property than the one they originally inquired about, uniform standards across communities protect applicants and operators alike. 

“The big focus has been removing the friction for 70% to 80% of our highest qualified applicants and getting them through to a decision as quickly as possible,” said Nate Thompson, Director of Resident Qualifications at Morgan. “And with that, you get efficiency.”

Where objective risk signals warrant a closer look, applications are routed to Morgan’s centralized screening team of trained specialists who apply the same documented standards to every file, ensuring that additional review is consistent, data-driven, and defensible.

That data focus also shaped how Morgan responded to evolving fraud tactics. Confronted with a sophisticated market for falsified documents, the team moved completely document-less, replacing PDF-based verification with direct data connections to payroll providers and financial institutions. The shift eliminated an entire category of fraud risk by removing human-produced documents from the equation entirely and replacing them with verified, source-of-truth data.

The result is a screening process that does what good screening should: it moves qualified applicants through quickly, applies additional review where objective risk signals warrant it, and keeps decisions grounded in verified data at every step.

Trust the experience. Verify with data.

Fraud isn’t going away. If anything, it’s getting faster, smarter, and harder to detect.

“AI is a multiplier on both sides of the fight,” Endres said. “It’s gasoline, and if you point it to a process or workflow that is already broken, you’ll make it faster for fraudsters to break in.”

Across Windsor, Morgan, and Kane, operators are responding by tightening how the work gets done by centralizing decision-making, moving verification earlier, and leaning on technology built to handle it at scale. Because for most renters, this isn’t about gaming the system, it’s about finding a great place to live, and the process should work for renters, not against them.

With the goal of letting the right renters breeze through faster, and trip up the bad ones along the way. Because for most renters, this isn’t about gaming the system, it’s about finding a great place to live, and the process should work for renters, not against them.