What Is an Apartment Rental Offer Letter?

When trying to rent an apartment, every landlord or property manager has specific criteria they want you to meet.

A minimum income is one of these criteria, with most landlords and property managers looking for tenants to have three or four times the rent amount in income. Sometimes it's possible to use apartment rental offer letters to verify what you make.

An apartment rental offer letter is not a letter offering you an apartment, as the title suggests.

Rather, it is a letter from a new employer verifying a job offer. If you do not have any rental history or cannot present your prospective landlord with paystubs, the offer letter proves to the landlord that you will have an income sufficient to meet the amount of rent stipulated in your apartment lease agreement.

Each state has its own guidelines in terms of what constitutes sufficient evidence of income when applying to rent an apartment or other property. Similarly, landlords are able to establish their own application guidelines, as long as they apply those guidelines to all who apply and keep the guidelines within the scope of local, state and federal law.

This means that an apartment rental offer letter is not sufficient to have an apartment rental application approved in all cases, particularly since an offer from an employer indicates only your new employer's position and remains silent as to whether you've accepted the employment. To be sure your prospective landlord will accept one, ask the landlord outright before you go through the trouble of setting up a showing and filling out your application.

Because apartment rental offer letters actually are from a new employer, they make no mention of the apartment you are trying to rent. Instead, they indicate the company making the offer, your name and current contact information, the job position offered, the dates of prospective employment and, perhaps most importantly, details about how much the employer will pay you in salary and benefits.

If you have no other way to verify your income, make a copy of your original offer letter. Then, contact your employer's human resource department and ask a representative to send you a letter indicating they recognise your agreement to work. Attach the copies to your rental application and submit the application to your prospective landlord.