Conducting Tenant Screening Verification Puts you ahead of over 80% of other landlords who don’t do any tenant screening.

Tenant Screening: Investigating the Personal Background History of the Rental Applicant

Shockingly, most landlords don’t bother to thoroughly investigate the personal track record of their rental applicants.  It is really difficult to imagine why anyone would not conduct a comprehensive background check on every single rental applicant. We have found that those landlords and property managers who fail to engage in the process of conducting a tenant background check substantially increases the odds of accepting bad tenants with unacceptable track records for being granted a lease.   The national court system is absolute proof that landlords are certainly doing a very poor job of screening their rental applicants because of the enormous amount of litigation that is ongoing as it relates to landlord-tenant disputes.  Very often, it takes some painful experiences and some landlords must learn the hard way to be convinced that the track record and personal background history of their rental applicants make a huge difference in the kind of quality of tenants that they attract.   It is absolutely vital that you obtain complete tenant verification records for the following:

*Detailed Address History including a listing of other household members

*All Relevant Civil and Criminal Records

• Judgments
• Evictions
• Bankruptcies
• UCC Liens, Judgment Liens, and Tax Liens
• Criminal Filings

*Delinquent Collection Accounts/Issues with Paying Creditors

*Relatives and Personal Associates

*Professional Licenses

*DMV Information (when allowed by state laws)

Without this information obtained for nationwide data, you are totally unable to determine the risk level with any particular rental applicant.  When analyzing renter applicants, you want to look out for a pattern or history that demonstrates that your prospective tenant is reliable and trustworthy.  This means that if you find judgments and evictions, you are dealing with elevated risk that is normally totally unacceptable with few, if any, exceptions.  This also obviously holds true for criminal history if it is of a serious nature as it is is clear warning that this individual has a track record and personal conduct that could be problematic as a tenant.

A Tenant Background Screening should always be preceded with a Rental Application completed by your prospective tenant.  Very often, this information provided by your applicant can be an extremely helpful in the process of investigating your prospective tenant.   Comparing the addresses provided with the information that we provide within the tenant screening report can help you uncover false information that may be provided to you with the intention of hiding his or her history.  We have found that in some cases, applicants have provided fake addresses in hopes that the landlord may not discover a past eviction or that the applicant had actually been incarcerated.