The short answer: Yes.
Due to a tight housing market and a shift to online leasing, the sophistication of rental scams has increased. While the frequency of reported scams fell in 2025, the average financial loss per case increased to over $2,000. With tools like AI, scammers can easily create hyperrealistic listings.
Many self-managers use Zillow to list their rental properties. While the real estate marketplace company offers some guidance on spotting rental scams, the platform doesn’t seem to have any proactive measures in place (beyond phone number verification during account setup) to protect your listing’s details from being stolen and used in a scam, or to confirm the validity of submitted documents.
In earlier blog posts, we’ve discussed how hiring a management company can minimize expenses, avoid legal mistakes, reduce evictions, and free up your time. Today, we’ll talk about another benefit: Protection from rental scams.
How Nickel City Property Management Prevents Scams and Fraud
Watermarking photos. By adding watermarks to photos, we can dissuade scammers from stealing the pictures and trying to relist the apartments under a fraudulent listing. Sure, it’s not quite as aesthetically pleasing, but it protects your tenants and your reputation.
Pre-screening prospects. On Zillow, inquiries are fielded via chat or email, and it can be hard to verify the identity of a prospect. We use ShowMojo to pre-screen prospects. Until they’ve met the qualification criteria, they aren’t able to gain direct access.
Showing process. Before a prospect is able to access the digital code that gives them access to the house or apartment for a self-showing (read more about the benefits of our self-showing process here), we gather their photo ID and phone number. These single-use access codes allow us to log, time, and track each showing.
Confirm the validity of submitted documents. Another weakness of using Zillow or a similar marketplace is their tenant application process. Zillow only verifies users’ identity during account setup and doesn’t verify the pay stubs, references, and rental histories submitted through its platform. At Nickel City Property Management, we work with screening partners like SingleKey to ensure the validity of ID, credit, SIN/SSN, employment, and income information.
Secure data retention. On Zillow, applicants share SSNs directly with third-party partners, and landlords have little control over how data is stored. In our process, we can ensure applicants that their data is encrypted within SingleKey and only accessible to authorized Nickel City staff.
The Bottom Line
You can’t prevent fraud if you’re dependent on the system put in place by Zillow or another real estate marketplace. Our system is professional, transparent, and trustworthy, blending technology and our team’s expertise to protect against scams and fraud.
