subject: How To Do A Tenant Screening The Right Way [print this page] Locating creditworthy renters and staying away from the bad renters is the goal of each landlord and property owner. However, the statistics show that a lot of leasing agents are not correctly investigating their prospective tenants and this is one of the reasons why there are so many judgments occurring against bad tenants. This process of screening renters should commence with requesting that your prospective tenant complete a rental application. The lease application should ask the prospective tenant to list a history of past addresses, employment and banking information as well as a list of references. This lease application will serve a number of purposes that will assist you as a property manager in the process of locating a good tenant. The information that your prospective tenant provides to you will contain the key data that you need to have to conduct a tenant screening. You may want to consider charging rental application fees to compensate for the costs of running credit checks on prospective tenants.
Once you have confirmed your rental applicant's employment status and financial information by verification with employers and financial institutions and contacted former rental managers to confirm on your rental applicant's payment history as a tenant, it is a good idea that you have a comprehensive tenant screening to conduct a background history report on your rental applicant person wanting to rent from you. There are many different options available for landlords to obtain tenant screening background reports, but unfortunately, many of these tenant screening services don't provide even the basic essential information that a landlord must have in order to be able to conduct a thorough tenant screening. For example, many services only give you data only from within the state of the applicant and does not include nationwide information for background history such as past judgments and criminal history. Also, another primary issue with many service providers is that their information is very old and not current. This may cause the landlord to be ignorant about a recent unlawful detainer or judgment that should have been reported by a service which has access to more recent tenant screening data. We recommend that you use a service that uses professional private investigators to conduct all of your tenant screening data.
If is also important to receive some form of credit reporting for your applicant even though it is not uncommon to obtain a credit report and find very little data on your prospective tenant. Look out for warning signs on the background report including items such as many recent credit inquires and collection items. One of the more important bits of data any property manager looking at a background report should be on the lookout for is past judgments and any criminal activity. Unlawful detainers are especially a major problem because it tells you that this individual forcibly removed by a previous landlord.
A good tenant screening will give you an excellent bird's eye view of exactly where your prospective tenant has resided for the last 2 to 3 decades. By comparing your tenant's application for lease with your applicant's screening report, you will be able to find any information which does not agree. There is almost never a good reason to grant a lease to a tenant if you come to the conclusion based upon good evidence that your rental applicant is not being truthful with you. If you see too many discrepancies, this is generally a warning that you can be heading towards bad things to come with this individual.
