I met Lucas Bourgeois to close out the year, our last Getting to Hell Yes conversation of 2025. Lucas has spent 15 years in multifamily, on both the operator and vendor sides. He’s been at Knock CRM, Updater, and now Get100, where he’s Head of Growth building a fraud prevention platform that’s already signed over 100,000 units in its first 90 days.

But what makes this conversation interesting isn’t the growth trajectory story. It’s the problem itself.

93% of property owners reported experiencing fraud in the last 12 months. Over 70% encountered identity theft. And here’s the kicker: most operators don’t realize how much fraud they actually have until they run an analysis.

Because fraud doesn’t announce itself. It shows up as bad debt. As evictions. As turns. As delinquency. As your leasing team spent hours underwriting applicants who were never real to begin with. 

Lucas and Get100 co-founder Caren Maio didn’t start by building fraud prevention software. They started with a listening tour, talking to 10-15 NMHC Top 50s about what was actually breaking in their operations. The answer kept coming back to collections. And when they dug deeper, collections traced back to one of two things: life events (unavoidable) or bad screening decisions (preventable).

So they fixed the preventable part.

The Fraud Cocktail Problem

Most fraud prevention in multifamily is what Lucas calls a “fraud cocktail”. It’s a little bit of ID verification over here, income verification over there, credit checks somewhere else. Nothing talks to each other. Nothing triangulates the data.

“A lot of these companies think, oh, we’ve got it. But they’re still getting fraud in the door. And they’re still wasting a lot of time having the leasing agents be underwriters.”

Here’s what that looks like operationally:

• Applicant submits fake ID
• Leasing agent manually reviews pay stubs (also fake)
• Background check comes back clean (because the identity is synthetic)
• Application gets approved
• Unit comes off the market
• Two months later, rent stops coming
• Eviction process starts (expensive, time-consuming, legally complex)
• By the time you recover the unit, you’ve lost thousands, potentially tens of thousands

And the leasing agent? They got their commission. The property manager hit their occupancy target. The fraud doesn’t show up in the P&L until Q2 or Q3, when it’s someone else’s problem.

That’s not a fraud problem. That’s a system problem.

Why Leasing Agents Shouldn’t Be Underwriters

Lucas made a point that should be uncomfortable for everyone: leasing agents have a fundamental conflict of interest when it comes to screening applicants.

“They’re commissioned off of leases. Every person that walks through that door when I was leasing, I want them to lease because you want to get your commission check.”

It’s not about bad actors. It’s about incentive structures. If your bonus is tied to occupancy and your commission is tied to closed leases, you’re financially motivated to push marginal applicants through. You’re not equipped legally or practically to do forensic accounting on whether someone’s pay stub is legitimate.

And here’s the part that makes it worse: it’s not fair to them.

You’re asking on-site teams to make judgment calls that should be systematic. You’re putting them in a position where they have to be the “bad guy” delivering declines, often based on incomplete or inaccurate information. And you’re exposing the company to fair housing violations because manual review creates inconsistency.

Get100’s approach flips this entirely: remove the leasing team from the screening process. Add friction at the front of the funnel, not the back.

“Get rid of the empty calories. The historic model is you have ten leases on the weekend, by Monday, five fall through because they’re not financially qualified. Why are you even wasting your time on those when you can add the friction up front and have a more predictable, real pipeline of applications?”

Mortgage Pre-Approval for Multifamily

The analogy Lucas uses is perfect: mortgage pre-approval for multifamily.

You don’t hold a house for someone who hasn’t proven they can afford it. Why do we hold apartment units?

Get100’s workflow requires identity verification before anything else. Biometric scan. Then income verification. Then background, criminal, credit. Only after someone passes all those checkpoints do they get approved and only then does the leasing team see them.

What this means operationally:

• 40-50% of applicants drop off at the ID verification step (either fraudulent or know they won’t qualify)
• Of those who pass ID, 80% convert through the full process
• Leasing teams only interact with pre-qualified, real applicants
• No more forensic accounting of pay stubs
• No more emotional decisions about marginal applicants
• No more commission-driven approvals of people who can’t afford the rent

“We’re taking over the application workflow. The only thing that leasing teams see is an approved application in their system. That’s it.”

The Bot vs. Bot Problem (Coming in 2026)

Lucas and I went down an interesting rabbit hole: what happens when AI agents start applying for apartments on behalf of renters?

I built one in 90 minutes. No joke. I coded an agent that could shop for units in Fort Lauderdale, negotiate concessions, and walk through the entire application process, it’s all automated. I didn’t close on it (obviously), but I got disturbingly far.

Lucas’s take: “It’s inevitable. Technology is here to stay and AI is here to stay. The renters want this on-demand frictionless negotiation experience.”

His prediction? We’ll see bad actors using bots by Q2 2026. By the end of year, there’ll be a legitimate Trivago-style service that does apartment shopping and negotiation for you.

The defense? Biometric verification. An AI bot can’t pass a biometric selfie scan. At least not yet.

The Economics: Why Consumption Pricing Wins

One of the smartest decisions Get100 made was pricing. They don’t charge property management companies. They charge the applicant a consumption-based pricing.

“The math just hasn’t been math-ing for years. Multifamily has fallen into the cycle of price per unit, price per unit, price per unit. Some proptech makes sense to be a price per unit. Others don’t. It’s a transactional model.”

Here’s why this matters:

If you’re charging $1.50-$2.00 per unit per month, but only 30-40% of units turn in a given year, the property is paying for coverage they’re not using. It’s like paying for insurance on a car you don’t drive.

Consumption pricing aligns incentives: Get100 only makes money when properties lease units. Properties only pay when they’re actually using the service. And applicants who are the ones benefiting from faster, more transparent approvals – pay the fee.

It also solves a GTM problem: no budget conversations. No procurement cycles. No annual renewals. You’re not asking a property to carve out $50K from their operating budget. You’re asking them to implement a process that costs them nothing and reduces their fraud exposure.

When the buyer doesn’t have to write a check, objections disappear.

Who Prioritizes Fraud?

The challenge isn’t convincing operators that fraud exists. Everyone knows it exists. The challenge is getting fraud onto the priority list ahead of everything else competing for attention.

Lucas’s answer: “Usually you’re talking to chiefs of technology or CEOs. Sometimes they have a fraud department. But at the end of the day, everyone we’ve talked to knows fraud is an issue. Delinquency is an issue.”

The tell? Bad debt is growing. Evictions are up. Turns are more expensive. Collections are out of control.

But here’s what most operators don’t know: how much of their bad debt is fraud-related versus just bad luck.

Life events happen. People lose jobs, get divorced, have accidents. That’s unavoidable. But bad screening decisions? Those are preventable. And when you can’t distinguish between the two, you can’t manage either effectively.

That’s where analytics models come in not just to catch fraud, but to predict it. To see patterns. To identify when someone is hopping from property to property with “look at me” specials, churning every two months, moving to the next building.

“These folks know what they’re doing. There’s YouTube channels. There’s lots of ways. Every day you’ll see more ways to circumvent the system.”

The Three Problems Get100 Solves

During their listening tour, three problems kept surfacing:

1. Siloed technology
Every fraud solution tackles one piece. ID here, income there, credit somewhere else. Nothing triangulates the data to see the full picture.

2. Leasing agents as underwriters
On-site teams make final decisions based on incomplete data and conflicting incentives. This creates inconsistency, fair housing risk, and bad outcomes.

3. Broken financial models
Price-per-unit doesn’t align with how fraud prevention is actually consumed. Properties pay for coverage they don’t use, and vendors have no incentive to improve conversion rates.

Get100’s solution: one platform, biometric verification at the front, leasing teams removed from screening decisions, and consumption-based pricing that aligns incentives.

“We only make money when you make money.”

What Makes Buyers Say Hell Yes

The hell yes moment for Get100 isn’t about convincing someone fraud is a problem. It’s about showing them they’re already paying for it, in bad debt, evictions, wasted leasing hours, and legal fees.

The objections Lucas hears aren’t “we don’t have fraud.” They’re:

• “We want to stick with our full-stack PMS provider”
• “Now isn’t the right time, we’re implementing too many things”
• “We have a relationship with another fraud provider”

But rarely a hard no. Because the problem is real, the cost is measurable, and the alternative (doing nothing) is getting more expensive every quarter.

What changes the timeline? When bad debt hits a threshold. When an ownership group asks uncomfortable questions. When a regional VP realizes they’re spending 40% of their leasing team’s time on applicants who never convert.

Hell yes buyers don’t need to be convinced fraud exists. They need a solution that doesn’t disrupt operations, doesn’t require budget, and delivers results immediately.

What I’m Thinking About

Fraud isn’t sexy. But it’s expensive. And it’s getting worse.

The AI bot problem Lucas and I discussed isn’t theoretical, it’s happening now. The sophistication of synthetic identities, fake documents, and CPN (Credit Privacy Number) fraud is escalating faster than most operators realize.

But here’s what struck me most about this conversation: the fraud problem is really a systems & data problem.

It’s not about bad people doing bad things (though that happens). It’s about incentive structures that reward occupancy over quality. It’s about asking on-site teams to make judgment calls they’re not equipped to make. It’s about accepting “good enough” screening because the cost of friction feels higher than the cost of fraud.

Until you run the numbers. And then you realize that one fraudulent lease costs more than 100 legitimate application fees.

Lucas and the Get100 team are doing something rare: they’re solving an unsexy problem in a way that aligns incentives for everyone – properties, leasing teams, applicants, and investors.

And they’re doing it with consumption pricing, biometric verification, and a willingness to be the “bad guy” so leasing agents don’t have to.

Lucas and I talked about why fraud shows up as collections, how AI bots will change apartment shopping in 2026, and what it means to flip the rental application model on its head.

If you’re managing properties, deploying capital, or building proptech, this matters.

Catch the replay and I’m curious: Do you know how much of your bad debt is actually fraud?