In this final episode in our season on fraud prevention, we explore the impact of another huge industry trend, centralization, on fraud prevention, as screening increasingly moves out of the leasing officeIn this episode, Dom Beveridge speaks with Marlee Murdock of Western Wealth Communities, Gardner Rees of Greystar, and Christi Weinstein of BH about how centralization changes accountability, decision-making, and compliance.

The conversation covers:

• Three different centralization journeys: an owner-operator, the industry’s largest operator, and an NMHC Top 10 owner/operator with a mix of owned and third-party properties, approached centralization in different ways.

• Centralization as a compliance discipline: Screening is one of several onsite activities that are moving into small groups of subject-matter experts, improving consistency while reducing training burden and policy drift.

• The benefits of removing conflicted decision-making, separating approval decisions from leasing incentives, limiting overrides driven by occupancy pressure and reducing insider risk.

• Operational readiness and cultural change, and how successful centralization depends on preparing teams for new workflows, redefining roles, and retraining staff to manage systems rather than perform manual underwriting.

• Why fraud is an organizational problem, reframing screening as a portfolio-level risk function, not a site-level task, aligning decisions with long-term asset performance.

• Lessons learned, and the need for continuous improvement: centralized fraud prevention is iterative—adjusting staffing, workflows, and controls as fraud patterns evolve and portfolios change.

Sponsors for this episode:

Western Reporting, resident screening and income verification by Inhabit

EliseAI, AI-driven automation that helps streamline communications and improve operational efficiency.

To get access to the latest 20for20 articles, papers and news about forthcoming events, subscribe to our blog at 20for20.com.

Connect with Dom Beveridge (Principal, 20for20) via LinkedIn, or email to dom@20for20.com.

Our theme, “Beautiful Geometry” by Phish Funk is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License.

Fraud detection has become more automated, but is there a case for more human intuition in the process? In this episode, Dom Beveridge speaks with Damon McCall, founder of ApproveShield, about how human judgment, conversation and case-level review can improve outcomes for both operators and onsite teams.

The conversation covers:

• The human role in screening: Bringing together identity, income and rental history, applying context and judgment to find edge cases that automated checks might miss.

• Centralized casework instead of onsite burden: How dedicated teams handling applications separates sales from screening and removes the onsite conflict of declining applicants.

• Detection of behavioural red flags: Can people spot patterns that algorithms might miss? Implausible income movement, repeated false identity-theft claims, inconsistent narratives—that often evade automated checks.

• Why friction is your friend: Keeping some manual steps by design helps, because a purely low-friction process creates blind spots and raises exposure to fraud

Sponsors for this episode:

Western Reporting, resident screening and income verification by Inhabit

EliseAI, AI-driven automation that helps streamline communications and improve operational efficiency.

To get access to the latest 20for20 articles, papers and news about forthcoming events, subscribe to our blog at 20for20.com.

Connect with Dom Beveridge (Principal, 20for20) via LinkedIn, or email to dom@20for20.com.

Our theme, “Beautiful Geometry” by Phish Funk is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License.

Fraud in multifamily has evolved from individual and opportunistic to a more coordinated and sophisticated enterprise. In this episode, Dom Beveridge speaks with Jess Tierney, chief integration officer at Verifast, James Stilwell, head of fraud forensics at Snappt and Maitri Johnson, senior vice president at TransUnion, about the mechanics of organized fraud, how it spreads, and what operators need to understand about the threat.

The conversation covers:

• Fraud rings, testers, and influencers: How organized groups test properties share techniques, and sell full “rental packages.” Some even create shell management companies to probe fraud systems. Social channels accelerate the spread.

• Inception fraud and synthetic identities: How fraudsters build real credit profiles from fabricated identities, using child, deceased, inmate and CPN-based SSNs.

• Insider risk and incentives: Overrides driven by occupancy pressure or commissions remain a material vulnerability. Centralized workflows reduce the surface area for insider manipulation.

• Signals in the data: Including cross-market patterns, late-night applications, single-document submissions, mismatched device data, repeated use of lightweight payroll tools, or multiple applicants linked to the same fraud ring.

Sponsors for this episode:

Western Reporting, resident screening and income verification by Inhabit

EliseAI, AI-driven automation that helps streamline communications and improve operational efficiency.

To get access to the latest 20for20 articles, papers and news about forthcoming events, subscribe to our blog at 20for20.com.

Connect with Dom Beveridge (Principal, 20for20) via LinkedIn, or email to dom@20for20.com.

Our theme, “Beautiful Geometry” by Phish Funk is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License.