Declaration of Independents: John Bradford

• By: Will Jones
• August 1, 2025

John Bradford

Founder & CEO

PetScreening

Charlotte, North Carolina

Bradford is on a mission to make life better for pets. After starting out in the property management world—first managing his own rental units, then expanding to investor portfolios—he saw firsthand how pet ownership impacted housing. That insight led him to launch PetScreening, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that helps streamline offering pet and renters insurance.

At the heart of it is the proprietary FIDO Score^™, a data-driven tool to assess pets more fairly than outdated breed restrictions. Today, the platform is used by about 1 in 7 rental units in the U.S.

“Our goal is to help change hearts and open eyes when it comes to breed restrictions,” Bradford says. “We can’t force anyone to accept every dog, but we can give them the data to make better decisions.”

How does your agency work?

We’re not an independent agency in the traditional sense. We’ve built partnerships with a few carriers and operate more like a referring agency. Our core product is a SaaS platform. When renters move, they need to get new insurance. We know they’re moving, so it’s a natural fit to offer renters insurance.

Why focus on renters insurance?

Renters typically don’t offer the same long-term value as homeowners, so most agencies don’t make it a priority. They’ll write those policies, but it’s not usually a core focus. For us, though, renters insurance is a complimentary offering to our core service and, along with pet health insurance, an area of focus. We’re at the front of the funnel when someone applies to rent.

How does the FIDO score work?

People have FICO scores, which are used by property managers for rental screening. We created the FIDO Score to be used by property managers for pet parents. It helps property managers evaluate pets based on real data, not just breed labels. We collect detailed information about each pet—vaccination status, microchip info, vet contacts and training certificates—because if a dog is a pit bull, it doesn’t mean it’s a risk if the owner is clearly responsible.

We built an algorithm and scorecard that factors all of this in. Every FIDO Score is unique to each pet and its owner. The scale is simple—one to five paws—similar to Yelp or Google star ratings. We intentionally kept the metric easy to understand, but the logic behind the score is sophisticated.

How did you get into insurance?

I started in the property management space managing rental properties both for myself and others who were building rental portfolios as investments. As that business grew, I saw an opportunity to better manage pets and pet policies, which led to founding PetScreening.

What’s the business case for offering pet insurance?

Pets are everywhere—70% of U.S. households, whether they rent or own, have a pet. And it’s not just one. The average is about 1.6 pets per household. Pets are very much a core part of American life, but pets also bring risk. As a landlord, I know a pet is another living being in my property and that has implications. That’s why we created the FIDO score. Not just to show data about the pet, but also about the pet owner’s behavior and responsibility. You can learn a lot from that. The opportunity is huge.

Insurance for the greater good?

We believe that every pet should have a fair shot at housing. We’re proud that our product has helped expand access to housing for more breeds—that’s a positive, unintended consequence of what we do.

What is Fido Alert and Tabby Alert?

Believe it or not, around 10 million pets are lost or stolen in the US every year and many of those never make it home each year. It’s crazy. We’re launching rockets that can land themselves, but we still can’t get pets home consistently. Microchips are great and every pet should have one, but they’re not perfect. Sometimes the chip can’t be found, or the info isn’t up to date or the pet simply isn’t chipped.

That’s what led to the idea of creating an “Amber Alert” system for pets using SMS text messages for instant notification. Fido Alert is for dogs and Tabby Alert is for cats. It’s a free service for any pet in the US and Puerto Rico. We pay for the service using our company’s profits to do good. We’ve spent millions building the service and national alert network, but we do it as part of our mission: to help every lost pet find its way home. To date, we have sent over 10M lost pet alert text messages and have help reunite over 52,000 lost pets with their owners.

How else are you supporting pet owners?

We recently acquired BetterPet.com. It’s like WebMD, but for pets. All content is written by veterinarians. You can look up things like “My dog ate chocolate” and get accurate, professional advice. We acquired it to offer authentic, high-quality resources that help pet owners improve their pets’ health and lives.

Your favorite thing about being an independent agent?

My favorite part of what we do is improving the quality of life for pet owners. That has an insurance component, but it’s broader than that. We want people to go to bed at night knowing that if their pet somehow gets lost, there’s a national network working to bring them home. Everything we do is aimed at making life better for pets. That’s our mission.

Will Jones is IA editor-in-chief.