Applicant Owes Money to Former Property Manager

[Ursula B.]

Happy Presidents Day! Just looking for a gut check from other landlords/property managers.

I denied an application last week because the applicant owed ~$4K to a former apartment complex. It was an active collections account and occurred within the past 5 years.  The applicant seemed practically offended that I would think they couldn't pay the rent just because they owed money to a former landlord.  So I replied that I had no reasonable expectation that they would pay me when they owned quite a bit of money to a former landlord.  I offered to reconsider the application if they paid off their prior landlord...and the conversation went silent.

So now I'm wondering what everyone else does.  Do you just look at overall credit (like score, grade, etc) or do you look at and make decision on the details?

I've been doing this long enough to know better than to ignore the red flags, but this interesting encounter just has me wondering what everyone else looks at.

Ursula

[Matt Sicignano]

Of course that's not an acceptable tenant-you already know that. But as far as all the various  formulas, scores, metrics, judgment calls, and other methods of trying to fit someone in a category goes; the ONLY thing I care about is whether I'll get paid. And in the case of landlord/tenant relations , past performance is a good indicator of future behavior. There is no other indicator that will predict behavior, in my opinion. Not always, but enough so that the risk is not worth it for me. As far as any other screening methods, you can't predict the future. I've had "perfect" candidates screw me-after all, it has to start somewhere, right? I would even take your situation another step-I'd contact the landlord with the address and contact info of the deadbeat, and hope that if you ever got stuck holding the bag, someone would do the same for you.