This is the third blog in a series on how to screen perspective tenants. The first two are:
These
blogs go into ways you can screen a tenant, before they even fill out
an application. Todays talks about ways of screening, once the
application is front of you.
So
once you have gotten beyond the phone screening and the showing and
have a complete application in your hands, you have got a lot of work to
do. If you have a good application, you should have collected a lot of
information that needs to be checked out before you can consider the
applicant for an approval. The first and most basic step is to do a
quick public records search, which is free of charge to make sure the
person does not have any local felonies, evictions or anything else that
would disqualify them. You can also do a Google search of their names
and see what comes up there.
If
I find something at this point, I will notify the applicant and give
them their money back. I didn’t spend any of the application fee, and it
only took a couple of minutes of my time. I find the person is not as
angry about being rejected at this point, if they can get their money
back. Once I do actually run the information through the paid site that
I use, they will no longer get a refund.
I
usually look over the application one more time, prior to running the
credit. sometimes there are things that may have ben missed, like the
dat they are looking to move in. is it reasonable or is it a month or
more out? if it is more than a week or two, i usually contact the owner
to see if they would be willing to hold the property for that long. Are
they smokers is another question on the application, that may warrant a
call to the owner prior to running credit. Smoking is not allowed in
the majority of rental properties these days, but some people still
smoke, and they might say yes, to the smoking question, but state that
they only smoke outside. This can be true in some cases, and not true
in others. I like to give my owner the opportunity to make that call. I
also double check as to whether or not they listed a pet on the
application, and if yes, what type and/or breed. This is important
especially if I did not show the rental property, and therefore did not
have the opportunity to screen them on this at the beginning.
If
everything checks out, I move forward with the processing of the
application. As you can see, it is a lot more complicated than it would
seem that is why a good property manager is a very good asset to have. 
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