If your community has sent you to a link that ends in petscreening.com — usually a subdomain named after your property — your emotional support animal request is going to a third-party review team before anyone at the leasing office looks at it.
PetScreening is unusually open about how that review works, which is good news: it means you can prepare for the specific things they check rather than guessing. Everything below is quoted or closely paraphrased from PetScreening’s own published pages, read on July 27, 2026. This is general information, not legal advice.
What PetScreening is
PetScreening is a pet-policy platform sold to housing providers. Its own marketing describes it as “created by property managers, for property managers”. Communities use it for two different things: scoring household pets (its FIDO Score product assigns a risk level to a pet) and reviewing assistance-animal accommodation requests.
It is widely embedded. Property-management software vendors integrate with it directly — Entrata announced a PetScreening partnership on October 21, 2024, and PetScreening publishes integrations with other platforms alongside it. That is why the link you were sent looks like it belongs to your apartment: each community gets its own branded portal.
Pick the assistance animal profile, not the pet profile
This is the step that costs people the most, literally. PetScreening runs both profile types through the same portal, and they are not the same request:
- Household pet profile. You supply, in PetScreening’s words, “a profile with details about your pet, including things like vaccinations and basic information.” PetScreening states there is “an annual fee for household pet profiles, which helps cover the cost of securely processing and managing your pet’s information.”
- Assistance animal request. You supply, again in their words, “information specific to Service or Emotional Support Animal so your property can properly accommodate your needs.” PetScreening’s applicant and resident FAQ states plainly: “Assistance animal and no pet profiles are $0.” Its assistance-animal page repeats that “there is no cost for an individual to submit a reasonable accommodation request.”
If you register your ESA as a pet because that was the first button on the screen, you have paid a fee to ask for the wrong thing, and your community’s breed, weight, species and pet-rent rules are now the rules you are under.
The part that catches people out: they call your provider
This is the single most important thing to know about PetScreening, and the reason a cheap instant certificate is worse than useless here.
PetScreening’s page for property managers says its in-house Assistance Animal Review Team “contacts every health care provider to affirm the documentation submitted is authentic.” Its resident-facing page is worded slightly more loosely — “During the review, our Assistance Animal Review Team may contact the healthcare provider to confirm that a document is reliable and authentic” — but the safe assumption is the stronger one. Plan for the call to happen.
What that means in practice:
- The professional named on your letter has to be real, currently licensed, and reachable.
- They have to be willing and able to confirm that they wrote it and that you are their patient or client.
- A letter generated by a website that never evaluated you has nobody who can answer that call. A registration number or a certificate is not documentation of a disability-related need and will not survive this step.
If you are not sure your current letter would hold up to a verification call, that is worth fixing before you file, not after a denial. Our guide to which online ESA letters are legitimate covers the difference.
The standard they review against
PetScreening states that its review team assesses requests “consistent with the HUD/FHAct guidelines”, and on the resident side sets out the documentation standard directly: “Under the FHAct a housing provider can request reliable and credible documentation that confirms an individual is disabled and has a disability-related need for each animal. A letter from a medical doctor, social worker, or mental health professional are acceptable sources of documentation.”
Two details in that sentence are easy to skim past and both matter:
- “each animal.” If you are asking for two animals, the documentation needs to support a disability-related need for both, not one letter covering a household.
- “disabled and has a disability-related need.” Two separate things. A letter confirming a diagnosis but never connecting the animal to it is a common reason a request comes back incomplete.
Who actually decides
PetScreening does not approve or deny your animal. In its own words: “PetScreening conducts a thorough legal review in accordance with Fair Housing Act (FHAct) and HUD guidelines. Our role is to provide a recommendation; the community retains full authority to approve or deny requests.” Elsewhere it describes the same handoff: the team “makes a recommendation, and it is shared with both the requester and the property manager.”
So a recommendation is not a decision, and neither is a denial from the portal the end of the conversation with your property. It is also worth being realistic: a community that has outsourced the review is very likely to follow the recommendation it paid for.
Getting through it cleanly
- Start the request before you need it. Review time depends heavily on how quickly your provider responds to the verification contact — a step neither you nor PetScreening controls. Give your provider a heads-up that a call or email is coming.
- Use the assistance animal profile. Free, and it is the only route that asks the question you actually want answered.
- Make sure the letter does both jobs. It should establish a disability and connect the animal to it, for each animal you are asking about, without needing to name your diagnosis.
- Keep your own copy of everything, with dates. When you submitted, what you submitted, and every response. If this ever becomes a dispute with your property rather than the portal, the timeline is what you will need.
- Check your state’s rules too. Some states require a minimum relationship period between you and the professional before a letter can be written. The state-by-state guide has the details.
One thing PetScreening cannot do is change the underlying legal picture. HUD withdrew its assistance-animal guidance notices in September 2025 and issued narrower enforcement guidance in May 2026 — the Fair Housing Act and its accommodation rules are unchanged, but the federal enforcement backstop is thinner. See what HUD’s 2026 guidance actually means. It is another reason a letter that can withstand a verification call is now the whole ballgame.
If your letter would not survive the call
We connect you with a licensed mental-health professional in your state who actually evaluates you, and who issues a housing letter if an emotional support animal is appropriate. That is the kind of documentation a verification step is designed to find. See how the evaluation works.
Other pages worth reading alongside this one: how OurPetPolicy’s review differs, the property-manager policy hub, and when an apartment can deny an ESA.
Sources
Quotations are from PetScreening’s assistance animals page, its residents page, and its applicant and resident FAQ, all read July 27, 2026. The Entrata integration date is from Entrata’s announcement of October 21, 2024. We are not affiliated with PetScreening and this page is not endorsed by them; if their published pages change, theirs are current and this one is not.