Renting is fundamentally broken. You submit precious personal info over to a random stranger along with payment to check your credit. Last time I checked, thi

Renting is fundamentally broken. You submit precious personal info over to a random stranger along with payment to check your credit. Last time I checked, this fee is $25-50 USD. You've now given them enough information to steal your identity. You also may need to do this multiple times if you're rejected. The person receiving this information rarely has identity protection measures in place and you receive no guarantees that they've destroyed this information. A much better solution would be to develop an escrow service which acts as a middleman between renters and landlords. Aspiring renters could sign up with the escrow and submit their information once. Their one-time fee would cover a fixed number of queries by potential landlords. The queries could include such information as income validation, criminal history, job history, rental history, etc. But these queries could be approved by the renter in advance. This sort of query process allows the renter to control the types of information given out. The queries could be structured to allow pass/fail results only, so that landlords do not receive intimate details but only know whether or not a renter is acceptable based on their criteria. Once you have a system like that, you can open it up to all sorts of validation queries. Think of it as a general personal information escrow service. This idea has been bouncing around in my head for over a decade now but I'm more of a low-level systems engineer so I never got around to trying to implement it. Seems like a decent startup idea though.