How to prevent a professional tenant

[Jennifer Bowen]

Good read. And it begs the question, if you're new to the game, how do you prevent professional tenants from moving in and taking advantage of your lack of experience? 

Indianapolis' worst renter owes thousands, but landlords can't collect

[Lee Smith]

Yes, doxpop.com is also good for looking up tenants in Indiana..

We have strict criteria we follow with tenants. We tell them from the first call what our criteria is. Gross monthly income must be 3 times the rent. We complete a background check and credit check. We expect that they have nothing in collections, and if they do we need to know what the scoop is(If they have some weirdly conceived story for judgments/collections, we require documentation to prove it).  

For our low income properties we will consider someone with up to 3k in collections, but we are very picky about that(medical stuff, etc), and after $1500 we want a double security deposit, and if they are on-time with payments for 6 months we will give them half the security deposit back as a credit towards the 7th month rent. Note: If our rent is $500 a month, we require a $500 security deposit.. Double that would be $1000.. This quickly weeds them out. Obviously we prefer nothing in collections, but we will work in lower income areas, hence we sometimes take a risk, but the owner approves this as well.

Their primary job is the only income we will accept.. If they come to us with 2 jobs and it barely gets them over the 3x rule, we will not allow it. I had a tenant who applied and qualified because she had a part time job.. Single mother, so I gave her the benefit of the doubt.. 1 week after she moved in she quit the part time job... RECIPE FOR DISASTER!!!  

We also don't consider SSI, or Disability, or child support as only means of income... No judge is going to let you garnish SSI, Disability or child support.  They have to have a job as well..

We also don't consider food stamps as income....

We may have the utilities on for viewings, but we shut it off the day before they move in.. In Indiana if they move in with utilities on, they can quite literally keep abusing you and you can't turn the utilities off on them. 

We NEVER trust the contact numbers that prospective tenants give us for previous landlords... We check tax records, google, facebook, etc to see if the phone numbers are legit... When we call the landlord they are moving from, we sometimes broach the initial call with "Hi, a friend of mine told me you have a house to rent?" This will a lot of times trick their brothers' sisters' mother into giving up the ghost that they are not the landlord they are supposed to be. 

Most of the time their stories just don't jive regardless... It's always funny when you see an emergency contact on the application is also the phone number they gave for their previous landlord, and it's supposedly different names!  My favorite was the girl who gave us her previous landlords phone number as the number she had texted us from originally when asking about the property...

Can you tell I work with low income housing? haha  You know how you can tell if a tenant is lying? Their lips are moving... That's a joke folks, I am here all night, tip the waiters and waitresses...