Reply #79: About a decade ago we were looking for an apartment to rent and came across the same thing.

[fasttense]

There was a nice little house that needed some serious cleaning that we were thinking of renting. The rental company wanted to charge us $75 to apply. This on top of the fact that we had to rent the property as is. That is they were not going to clean it up (and it was awful messy and needed painting) before we moved in. Of course we declined to pay and left. One of the employees there followed us out and told us they would sign us up for free. That the $75 was to keep "certain people" from applying. I wasn't quite sure who those certain people were. But I suspected it was to keep minorities out. We got out of there as fast as we could.

About 50% of the units we were interested in required some kind of fee to apply. We made it clear we wouldn't pay their fees and many of them offered to waive or offset their fees.

I really think the fees are there to prevent minorities from applying and to discourage "certain people".