Confirming Landlord on Application

[Niles Crum]

I have a gut feeling that a prospective tenant is supplying false information on the application.  The landlord was "glowing" about her as a tenant.  I tried a free phone lookup to confirm the number belongs to the name the prospect gave me for her previous landlord but can't get the number confirmed.  

Is there a source to do an online check to see who the owner of a phone number is so I can be assured that she didn't give me a name of one of her friends to supply the reference?

[Steve Babiak]

If you haven't been able to get the landlord's contact info on your own, then you have to start out by asking questions that a landlord would consider normal, but a friend of the applicant would wonder about (and think about saying "wrong number").  Things like "Do you have any units available for rent now?"  Another good one to try is to give the wrong address for the rental unit that the applicant supplied, and for a different length of time; the real landlord will say that isn't the correct address, the friend won't know the difference sometimes: "I see that this tenant of yours rented the unit at XYZ address for the last 5 years" and wait for the corrections.

But I always try to get phone numbers on my own, based on the rental address that was given (and the employers' names that were given too).  I look up the tax records for the property address for that rental unit, and that gets me the landlord's name and address.  I use google searches to try to find the phone number that goes with that name and address.  Even unpublished numbers will sometimes show up in the google "cached" info that is part of the "preview" of the page link that the search returns - and that happens even for sites where you would have to pay or subscribe to get the results.