An overlooked screening mistake is not verifying the current address stated on the rental application.
Bad tenants may not put down their current address if they know they are going to get a poor reference from their current landlord. So what do they do? They just leave it out or they enter a fictitious address.
So how do you catch this? You have to verify their current address with documentation.
We come across this routinely.
Now the applicant’s credit report will show their current address, but I’ve found that this isn’t always 100% accurate.
What about their driver’s license? It’s pretty common that the applicant never changed their address on their driver’s license, so this isn’t necessarily a red flag.
We recently had an applicant with this very issue. The current address did not match their driver’s license nor was it on their credit report. We had to dig in and verify if the current address on their application was legit, or was it left out on purpose.
I wanted to see their most recent credit card statement or check stubs.
In this case, the check stubs showed a completely different address than their current address. The applicant could not give a reasonable explanation or provide any documentation proving their current address. Because of this we could not approve the application.
So what happens if the applicant does provide a document showing a current address that matches their application. We go a step further.
We run a document scan through special software that detects if the document they provided was edited or tampered in any way.
If it was tampered with it will clearly flag it in red which is fraud.
So bottom line, before approving any rental application, make sure you can verify the current address listing on the application. This is often overlooked and It may save you a lot of grief.
I hoped this helped. Thank you for watching.
