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.