I grew up around real estate. That meant summers power washing roofs in brutal heat, ripping out old carpet, painting benches and learning early that nothing about buildings is abstract. Someone pays for every decision. Someone lives with every mistake.
My father and uncle ran a real estate company started by their father. From a young age, the rules were simple: work hard, study hard, be grateful. If you do those things, the system will reward you.
For a long time, I believed housing worked the same way.
As a kid, I was obsessed with apartments. I used to tell my dad I wanted to build the coolest communities for families — places with playgrounds, pools and shared spaces where people actually wanted to live.
Most of those ideas would never pencil out, but the instinct stayed with me. Even today, in every community we acquire, we invest heavily in amenities that improve quality of life. I care deeply about building durable housing for working families and professionals. It’s how I was raised to see the business.
I studied real estate and technology because I believed the future of housing would sit at the intersection of both. I tend to think in first principles: Strip away what people have always done then ask what still works and what no longer does.
At 22, I launched Eastman Residential, the multifamily arm of our family business, which I own and operate today. Eastman Residential now owns and operates more than 3,000 apartment units across the country, from Tennessee and Georgia to Indiana and Texas. In parallel, I also own and operate Eastman Company, which holds more than five million square feet of commercial real estate throughout the New York City tri-state area. We are long-term owners and operators, and we live with the consequences of our underwriting decisions.
Over the years, we focused on a niche others overlooked: distressed student housing in strong secondary and tertiary markets. In many cases, student demand had softened, but conventional housing demand had not. By re-tenanting and repositioning these assets, we housed families and working professionals without adding new supply. The buildings were there. The people were there. The friction sat in the system in between.
That friction shows up most clearly in leasing.
Traditional Screening Overlooks Qualified Applicants
When markets soften, due to seasonality, new deliveries or macro uncertainty, many owners instinctively respond by spending more on marketing or pushing site teams to work longer hours. In our experience, that is rarely the real constraint. More often, demand already exists. The problem is conversion.
Across thousands of units and multiple markets, we saw a consistent pattern: a significant share of applicants who could afford the rent were being denied based on rigid approval criteria that no longer reflect how people earn, pay or live.
Before starting any new initiatives, we closely examined our own data. Across a large portfolio of roughly 50,000 units with a baseline credit requirement of 600, we reviewed eviction outcomes over several years. The results surprised many people on our team. The average credit score of evicted residents was nearly identical to the average credit score of the overall resident population, both landing in the high 600s.
Credit score alone did not meaningfully predict who would cause operational issues in a building.
What credit does correlate with is delinquency risk, and that distinction matters. Delinquency risk is a financial exposure, not a moral one, and it can be measured, priced and mitigated without defaulting to blanket denials.
Yet legacy screening systems still rely on blunt inputs designed for a different renter economy. They struggle to account for non-W-2 income, income volatility, recent life events or thin credit files. Because Fair Housing laws require consistency, site teams often have no flexibility to evaluate applicants more holistically. So they say no — even when the decision does not align with lived experience or operational reality.
The consequences are not just human. They are economic.
Every unnecessary denial shrinks the effective renter pool. It slows leasing velocity, extends vacancy day, increases concessions and ultimately drags down net operating income.
In softer markets, the last few points of occupancy are the hardest to earn, and they rarely come from more marketing spend. They come from converting demand that already exists but is being screened out by outdated tools.
At the same time, many operators tell themselves a comforting story: that stricter screening automatically produces better residents, or that approving edge cases invites problems into the community. In practice, we often see the opposite.
Renters who fall just outside traditional criteria are frequently highly motivated, pay more upfront and work harder to stay current because they had to clear higher hurdles to secure housing.
These renters include immigrants building U.S. credit for the first time, recent graduates starting their careers, individuals rebuilding after divorce or medical debt and workers with multiple income streams that traditional underwriting struggles to capture. These are not fringe cases. They are the modern renter.
The solution does not require lowering standards. It requires modernizing underwriting.
One promising approach is separating qualification from protection, using better data to evaluate applicants more accurately and pairing approvals with structures that protect the property if something goes wrong. When risk is understood and appropriately backstopped, owners can say yes more often without compromising asset performance or compliance.
I now spend much of my time working on these issues from both an ownership and technology perspective. I am also the co-founder and CEO of a third-party guarantor platform, Cosign, built to address the approval gaps I first encountered as an owner and operator. I mention this for transparency, not promotion. The broader point is that these solutions did not emerge from theory or pitch decks. They came from operating real assets and confronting the limits of legacy systems.
Housing is not just a moral issue. It is a systems issue. It is a business issue. And it is an opportunity.
When underwriting becomes more intelligent, renters gain access and dignity. Owners improve conversion and stabilize occupancy. Assets perform better over the long term.
We do not need to choose between access and protection. We can design for both.
The problem is not that too many renters are unqualified. The problem is that the approval system has not kept up with who renters actually are.
It’s time it does.
Zach Schofel is managing partner at Eastman Residential and co-founder and CEO of Cosign.