You may be a landlord or a lease manager, when you start to contract with a potential tenant, you must not enter into a lease contract right away. You must first exercise diligence when it comes to dealing with a potential tenant. Or you might end up with a pre-terminated lease contract with unsettled lease payments.
In view of protecting your leased properties, you should be open to investing in tenant screening services so that you have a background on whether or not it will be good for you to enter into a lease contract with such potential lessee or tenant. It is also crucial that you employ tenants whom you can trust to pay the rental payments on time, protect the property that you leased to them, and of course act as noble citizens.
Should tenant harms or damages another tenant, you as the landlord can be held liable for such tenant’s acts. You should be able to check your potential tenants on various databases, such as those on terrorist groups, sex offenders, document falsification, and those which have a history of evictions.
With the help of tenant screening, these background checks will then assist you to further verify that such applicant is truthfully representing himself or herself. It is better this way than just going turning a blind eye on these potential threats just so you can earn. What is the use of that if you are dealing with problematic people anyway?
Although some might make good of how they purport themselves to be, then that is quite good absent the tenant screening. There are still consequences should you opt not to conduct a background check on your potential tenants. Conducting credit checks is also very important because who in their right minds are willing to contract with tenants who have subpar credit scores? None. But, of course, there is nothing prohibiting you from contracting with them, but this exposes you to the risks of delayed rent payment, or worse wasting your time going after such tenant because he or she just suddenly disappeared in your premises. If you have tenants which bad paying habits, this, in turn, could resonate on you because you might also end up not being able to meet with your own obligations just because that certain tenant did not pay on time. It is much better to know how the financial health of your tenant is because this gives you the assurance that your tenant will always be capable of meeting with their obligations. With this kind of procedure, you are already discouraging tenant who knows for themselves about their bad credit standings which is essentially not bad for your business. Other tenants with criminal records might be an indicator to become bad tenants in the future also, but you must be able to segregate them against those who really are high-risk. This is because you might end up facing discrimination charges in pursuit of conserving your business.
If you are the owner of the leased properties, of course, you want to contract with tenants who also know how to take care of your property, as if it was their own. By way of tenant screening, you will then have an idea on the background of such tenants which can become factors that such tenant will not be able to execute proper care with your properties. With background checks, you will be able to expose potential complications like drug use history, or an identified terrorist activity. It is obviously not safe for you as a landlord to be connected with these kinds of people because they will do no good not only with your property but to you and your business as well. With the help of tenant screening, you will be able to expose red flags before you even begin to execute a lease contract.
If you decide on availing the services for tenant screening, you should be able to determine which tenant screening provider is best for your needs. Since you know your business as a landlord, you can be able to come up with a criterion which you think is of high priority when it comes to determining acceptable and unacceptable tenants.
It is important that these service providers have a national scale so that they can be able to service the widest customer base. The items below should give you some pointers on the criteria for what tenant screening service provider you want to be associated with:
- When it comes to pricing, there should be proper pricing as to individual tenant screening, or a la carte services and procedures.
- There should be unique features which set their firm apart thus giving them a competitive edge against other tenant screening service providers.
- When it comes to credit reporting methods, they should be able to provide you with the potential tenant’s FICO score and this information is usually from the three major credit bureaus.
- As to criminal background checks, they must be able to provide you with the potential tenant’s past convictions in one or several states so to give you a proper idea on who is about to live in your property.
- The tenant screening service provider should also be able to give you the potential tenant’s previous landlord history, the time frame of the tenant’s stay, and whether there was any eviction filed against such tenant.
- Of the other points, income and employment history is very important. The tenant screening service provider should be able to give you verifications on your potential tenants’ stability in terms of income and employment for you to know that they can really afford to lease your unit.
These are not straight-jacket criteria. This should just be able to guide you on what you should look into if you are considering employing tenant screening services. There are also setbacks when you employ these type of services, however, before you think negatively about it, you have to evaluate the necessity on why you should consider availing of tenant screening services not.
