Screening a tenant means collecting things about a person — an ID, a payslip, a certificate of employment. That is personal information, and how much of it you may keep, and for how long, is not left to preference.
The principles
“The processing of personal information shall be allowed, subject to compliance with the requirements of this Act and other laws allowing disclosure of information to the public and adherence to the principles of transparency, legitimate purpose and proportionality.”
Two of the principles in the same section decide most of the practical questions. Information collected must be:
“Adequate and not excessive in relation to the purposes for which they are collected and processed”
“Retained only for as long as necessary for the fulfillment of the purposes for which the data was obtained or for the establishment, exercise or defense of legal claims, or for legitimate business purposes …”
What that looks like in a rental
None of this is a rule written for landlords. It is what the principles above come to when the person in front of you is a prospective tenant.
- Ask for what the decision actually needs, and say what the decision is — identity and ability to pay are different questions and they need different documents
- Showing an ID and keeping a copy of it are not the same act. Decide which one you need
- Do not collect documents from people you have already turned down, and do not keep the ones you collected from them
- When the lease ends, the reason for holding the file usually ends with it
- Do not forward a tenant’s documents into a group chat of owners or agents. That is a disclosure, and it is the one that gets noticed
- If you use an agent, be clear about who is holding what — the file does not stop being yours because someone else took the photo
Refusing to hand over a document is not by itself a sign of a bad tenant. Asking why it is needed is what the law expects a person to be able to do.
What we hold
For a listing we keep the owner’s contact details and our own notes from the call that checked it. We do not publish an owner’s number on the listing page and we do not pass tenant documents around. If you want to know what we hold about you, ask us.
This page quotes the law and links to the source. It is information, not legal advice, and it is not written for any one person’s situation. For your own case, go to your barangay or to a lawyer.
Law text checked 2026-08-09