Bad Realtor who has cost me thousands of dollars

[Kent Harris]

When I first started purchasing houses I had a Realtor find me a lot of deals. Once the houses were renovated I had her put the houses up for Lease on MLS. She would have the prospective tenants run a background check on themselves, which was fine to do the preliminary screening. I told the Realtor that she needed to run a background check once they qualified. This never happened. One of the tenants I had to take to eviction court which we got an $8,000 judgement and was counter sued for discrimination against an elderly person, which was thrown out of court. After running a background check through a Private Investigator ($150) we found all sorts of things that would have prevented me from leasing to him.

Is the Realtor liable for not running the background check as requested? There are a lot of TREC rules that she has violated. If I went to them she would probably lose her license. What I'm looking for is the money I lost and nothing else.

After all this drama I started listing my own properties and using a company called www.MySmartMove.com to do the background checks. in the past 6 months I have not had any problems with my tenants, pertaining to Evictions or braking the lease.

[Steve Vaughan]

Where are all the 'You should hire a PM!' folks?  The 'work on your business, not in it!' people?  Here's a guy trying to hire the right people AND work on his business, not in it.  Where you at??

They maybe haven't discovered this yet because it's in the renters discussion.

This sucks and I'm sad to see you going through it @Kent Harris.

For the future, research and bookmark free sites that allow you to 'search case records' for your state.  You can search by name and see their court cases as a preliminary step. I've asked people to provide their credit report, but not their background check.  Once you have these searches available to you, it just takes a couple minutes to do a simple court records search and a sheriff dept & state sex offender search as well.  It's helped me avoid this.  Best wishes to you!