Last updated: September 2026.
This is a plain-language summary of how ApplyOnce handles your information. If anything here is unclear, email contact@applyoncenow.com and we'll explain it directly.
Full name, date of birth, email address, a password (stored as a one-way hash, never in readable form), and — optionally — a phone number and whether it has WhatsApp. Date of birth is collected only to confirm you're 18 or older, and is stored encrypted.
If you fill out a rental profile, we collect what's needed to put together a rental application: immigration/visa status, sponsor information if applicable, financial information (income, bank balance, employer), current and prior address history, rental references, housing preferences, and answers to a few honest screening questions (like prior eviction or collections history) that you choose to disclose. Visa/ITIN numbers, where provided, are stored encrypted the same way as date of birth and phone.
Uploaded documents (ID, proof of income, proof of funds, tax returns, and similar) are stored outside the site's public web folder and are never reachable by a direct URL — only you, while logged in, can view or download your own documents. We do not run OCR or any automated content-verification on documents today.
We do not run, request, buy, or share any credit check, credit score, credit report, or background check for any renter, from us or from any third party. That doesn't mean a property manager won't run their own: they may still run a credit check, background check, or both as part of their own screening process, entirely outside of ApplyOnce, and we don't receive the results.
The quiz on our homepage doesn't require an account. We collect only what you enter — income, employment status, desired property type, bedrooms, bathrooms, an optional city, and, if you choose to provide it, an email address. Sharing your email is always optional and only comes up after your results are already shown. If you provide it, we store it together with your quiz answers so we can email you your results, and you may also receive other emails from ApplyOnce afterward. We also report in aggregate on how people use the quiz. You can unsubscribe from these emails at any time via the link in each one. We don't share your quiz email or answers with property managers, landlords, or any other third party. If you don't provide an email, nothing from the quiz is stored beyond a rate-limit log tied to your IP address, and no cookies or tracking are used beyond what that single request needs.
If you choose to generate an application summary, your profile information and the documents you've uploaded are sent to Anthropic (the maker of Claude, the AI model we use) to produce a plain-language, descriptive write-up of what you submitted. Anthropic processes this content to generate the summary; we do not send it anywhere else, and the summary itself never includes a score, ranking, or a recommendation on your application. You can find Anthropic's own privacy practices at anthropic.com/legal/privacy.
If you activate a paid membership, payment is handled entirely by Stripe through their own hosted checkout page — we never see, receive, or store your full card number. We do store which membership status you're in (active, suspended, etc.), your billing period dates, and Stripe's internal customer/subscription IDs, so we know what state your account is in. Stripe's own privacy policy is at stripe.com/privacy.
Your full rental profile, documents, and AI-generated summary are shared with a property manager only when you actively choose to apply to them directly through ApplyOnce — either from the directory or by following a personal application link that property manager sent you. Some property managers in the directory list their properties on their own website (or elsewhere, like Zillow) instead — for those, the directory just links out to that listing, and we don't send them your profile or documents at all, since the application happens on their own site, outside ApplyOnce. Whichever kind of property manager it is, we never share your individual profile or documents with one you haven't actively applied to through ApplyOnce.
A property manager who accepts applications directly through ApplyOnce can choose to list an application fee amount and payment instructions on their profile, which we show you before you apply so you know what to expect. We only display what that property manager entered — we never collect, hold, or process that payment ourselves; paying it is a private arrangement directly between you and them.
Paying property manager members can see aggregate, anonymized statistics drawn from renter profiles across the whole ApplyOnce platform — for example, what share of renter profiles list an out-of-state current address, or what home size is most commonly sought. These statistics are counts and percentages only; we never show a breakdown built from fewer than 5 renter profiles, and any group smaller than that is folded into "Other" or hidden entirely, specifically so a statistic can never be small enough to identify one person. A property manager cannot use this feature to look up, search, or filter down to an individual renter's profile — only a renter who chooses to apply to that property manager directly through ApplyOnce makes their own profile individually visible to them.
Passwords are hashed with bcrypt and never stored or emailed in plain text. Date of birth, phone number, and visa/ITIN numbers are encrypted before being saved. All traffic to the site is encrypted (HTTPS). Access to the database is restricted to the account owner. Uploaded documents live outside the public web folder, reachable only through an access check tied to your own login.
To create and secure your account, confirm your email address, let you log back in, build your rental profile and application summary, process your membership payments, and to connect renters with participating property managers for rental applications. We do not sell your information, and we do not share it with anyone outside of that direct purpose (including the third parties named above — Stripe for payments, Anthropic for the optional AI summary) without asking you first.
Your account stays as long as you keep it. If you're a renter, your rental profile and uploaded documents stay saved while your membership is active, and for up to 90 days after you suspend your membership — this is so you can pick back up without redoing everything if you come back. If a suspended renter profile isn't reactivated within 90 days, we automatically and permanently delete the profile and all uploaded documents. If you're a property manager, the same 90-day rule applies to your company profile (name, contact info, service areas, application settings, and your personal application link) — if a suspended property manager membership isn't reactivated within 90 days, we automatically delete that company profile. Applications you've already received aren't affected. Either way, your account/login itself is never deleted by this process — only the profile data. You can also ask us to delete everything sooner (see "Your choices" below).
You can ask us to delete your account and personal data at any time by emailing contact@applyoncenow.com. Some requests may still be handled manually rather than through a self-service button while we continue building out account tools — we'll confirm with you once it's done
North Carolina law requires notifying affected users if certain personal data is exposed in a breach. We've designed the account system to minimize what's collected and to encrypt the most sensitive fields specifically to reduce that risk.
