What you are about to read can save you from having serious tenant problems.
We screen for good long-term tenants by checking an applicant’s credit, employment, eviction history, criminal history and residence history. We check an applicant’s rental history by contacting past and present landlords for a rental verification.
But there is a critical step in the tenant screening process that I see most landlords miss.
When screening rental applications, most landlords order reports from a screening service. These reports contain a credit, eviction and criminal report. Although these reports may be accurate, they most likely will not report a recent eviction filing on an applicant.
The big mistake that most landlords make in tenant screening is they don’t take the time and do a local eviction search in the county records. Let me explain.
If an applicant is applying for a home because they are getting evicted, the eviction filing will not show up on the eviction report. This is because the eviction may have been recently filed and not yet reported to the credit bureaus.
Because a recent eviction filing is not reported, it is important to take the time and manually search the county records to see if a recent eviction has been filed on an applicant.
We had a recent situation where an applicant met all qualifications to rent one of our homes. As a final step we searched county records and saw that an eviction was just filed on the applicant.
The eviction report from the screening service did not show any evictions and when we contacted their current landlord, the landlord gave a positive rental reference. It was clear that the landlord information stated on the application was fraudulent.
If we did not do this final crucial step in searching the county records, we would have never known about the eviction and probably would have had a serious problem tenant.
If you want good tenants, it is extremely important that you search local county records for an eviction filing before you approve an application.
