What are your renter screening criteria?

[Amanda G.]

Everyone says how important screening tenants is. Experts, what grade of property do you rent, and what are your tenant standards?

Income 3x rent?

A certain credit score?

Evictions/evictions filed?

Criminal history?

Bankruptcy info?

[John Warren]

I own both B class apartments here in the Berwyn area outside Chicago as well as C- class apartments in South Bend, Indiana. In Berwyn, we are easily able to stick to our criteria: Minimum credit score of 600, 3x the rent in income, no evictions, no criminal. In our C- class stuff, we realized after a few months that anyone that meets our minimum criteria in Chicago would just go buy a house. The housing stock is so cheap that it makes it much more challenging to find qualified renters. This leaves us leaning more on subsidized housing programs and lower quality tenants, which costs a lot more money ongoing! 

Because of this, I am attempting to purchase properties in better areas going forward. B class tenants are much, much easier on properties, and they are much easier to manage as well! If you can find buildings in areas that attract a mix of A and B class tenants, all the better! We even have one lady in our B class building that has an 800+ credit score! This could be due to the fact that her $850 rent is very affordable in relationship to the average home price of $250,000 in the area!