Choosing a tenant is a sensitive decision, so whether a scoring system is lawful comes down to how it is built and used.
What the law requires
- Data protection (DSG): personal data must be processed lawfully, in good faith, proportionately and only for a purpose the applicant can recognise (art. 6 DSG). The applicant can ask what data is held about them (art. 25 DSG).
- Decisions taken by software alone (art. 21 DSG): the applicant must be told, can state their view and can ask for the decision to be reviewed by a person. The article does not ban such decisions. It does not apply when a person makes the final choice.
- Discrimination: refusing a flat offered to the public because of race, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation can be a criminal offence (art. 261bis StGB), and a refusal for racist reasons also violates personality rights (art. 28 ZGB).
- What a landlord may ask: the EDÖB leaflet of 15 July 2025 allows identity, Swiss or foreign with the permit type, job and employer, income in bands and debt enforcement entries, and rules out marital status, religion, nationality as such and the current rent.
What a fair system looks like
- It scores only what matters for renting: income, documents, how well you fit the listing, and references
- It leaves out protected things completely: nationality, religion, age, gender, disability. Permit type is never read.
- It avoids hidden stand-ins for those things, like judging someone by their name, language or neighbourhood
- A person makes the final decision, not the software on its own
- The applicant can ask why they got their score and get a clear answer
Where careless scoring goes wrong
- An AI trained on past accept and reject decisions learns to imitate them, including the unfair ones
- Removing nationality is not enough: a surname, a first language or a neighbourhood can quietly stand in for it
- A black box nobody can explain makes it hard to inform applicants as the law requires
- Rejecting people fully automatically without telling them breaks art. 21 DSG
How aptari's Match Score does it
The Match Score is a clear set of rules, not a model trained on old decisions. It looks at four areas · income against the rent, dossier completeness, checked documents and the listing's smoking and pet rules · and nothing else. Protected characteristics are never part of the score, and there are no name or location stand-ins. Every score comes with the reasons behind it, and the agency stays the decision-maker. Your data is stored in the EU (Frankfurt); some processing is done by providers in the USA, see the privacy policy.
See how to rank applicants fairly and discrimination in tenant selection.
General information, not legal advice.