I noticed that using Autorank, people are not automatically promoted once they walk to a desired location. We have a pressure plate hidden inside our building that should promote our players instantly once they step on it, but players have to stand on it until Autorank updates (the check rate). I don't think it's necessary to use location checking in combination with an interval.

It might be that we are configuring it wrong but I'd like to know if this is intended behavior or a bug in the system.

This is intentional to lower the strain on the server. You can either have the pressure plate perform the /ar forcecheck command when a player steps on it (with a plugin) or have the player perform the /ar complete command.