How And Why To Screen Applicants For Your Rental Properties
There are a lot of important tasks you must do as a landlord, and one of these is screening the applicants that want to rent units from you. Screening each person that applies should be a standard procedure you complete, and here are three things to know about this.
The importance of good screening techniques
It can be very difficult to know which applicants to choose to be your tenants, as you will really have no idea if they are a good tenant or not until they have lived in one of your units for a while. There are ways, though, that can help you feel more confident with your choices, and this is an important part of running rental properties. Using good screening techniques may help you select the best tenants available, and having the best tenants will help you have less work to do and fewer problems to deal with.
The main differences between good tenants and bad tenants are that good tenants pay rent on time, cause fewer problems, and take better care of the units they rent. If this is your goal, you should implement some good screening techniques into the way you choose tenants for your rental properties.
The best methods to screen tenants
There are a lot of good methods you could use for this particular purpose, and one option is hiring a company to do the work for you. If you prefer to handle the screening activities on your own, you should aim to do the following things as you screen each person that applies for an apartment at your facilities:
- Criminal history report – Finding out whether a person has a criminal history or not is important, and you can easily do this through a criminal history report. You should realize that if someone has a charge from a long time ago, it may not represent who they are today, so it is important to keep that in mind when performing this check.
- Employment verification – It is also important to know if the person really has a job or not, and you can do this through an employment verification. You can either call the company they work for or send a letter they must fill out and return to you. This will also help you find out how much money the person makes, which is also good to know.
- Credit check – Before you can run a credit check on a person, you will need their permission, as running it will show up on their credit report.
- Prior landlord check – One additional step that can reveal a lot about a tenant is a prior landlord check. This will help you learn more about what previous landlords think about the person that wants to rent from you.
Any step you take that helps you learn more about an applicant will be beneficial in this process.
What you can do if you need help with this
If you are a landlord and are not good at screening and choosing tenants, you could always hire this job out to a property management firm, such as MacPherson's Property Management. When you hire this out, you will be paying an expert to do the job for you. A property management firm has experience with this and knows exactly how to sift through applications in order to choose the best tenants. Hiring this out will not only help you get better tenants, but it will also help relieve some of the duties you have, and it could make a huge impact on the success of your business.
