7 Step Tenant Screening Process
Posted: February 24th, 2014
The tenant screening process is one of the most important and critical things that a property manager can do to start off a landlord tenant relationship in the right direction. After years of selecting and combing through tenant applications we have developed a system to properly screen your next tenant. At My Area Realty Property Management we screen the following items:
1) National Credit Report: We do more than just check for credit scores. We analyze what type of debt and collections that the prospective tenant has. Most of the time we will rent a home to prospective tenant that has medical or school debt but we will not rent to a tenant who has debt or a collection from a previous landlord.
2) National Criminal Report: Our database pulls all the criminal data on each applicant to ensure that you are renting to a tenant that has not committed serious crimes in the past.
3) National Eviction Report: Not only do we search the Palm Beach County civil records for pending and closed eviction files but we also search to see if a tenant has had an eviction from any where else in the United States. This helps us prevent out of town prospective tenants from entering your home with a past eviction.
4) Income Verification: Although our application asks for applicants to state their income we also obtain a copy of the tenants W-2 or pay stubs to verify that they make enough money to cover the rent.
5) Rental History Verification- Although we make every attempt to contact a tenants previous landlord, sometimes this become difficult because some owners do not want to give out any information. But we feel that it is good practice to hear what other landlords have to say about our prospective tenant before we allow them to take occupancy.
6) Sex Offender Check- Our database will also verify if the prospective tenant is a registered as a sex offender
7) Character references and final interview- Once we have selected the tenant we will conduct a phone interview and or call their character references.