Frustrated screening first tenants

[Mo Muigai]

Ready to rent and has received a few applications. Nightmare comes when we try to screen criminal /credit /eviction. We tried verticalrent.com and Mysmartmove.com. They both require tenant to fill in information themselves, and when doing detailed record verticalrent required is to pay and the tenant to pay as well. What do you use to screen and is it possible to put in all the info without tenant doing it themselves? Thanks!

[Jim K.]

@Mo Muigai

My wife and I are local landlords in our area. We do mysmartmove.com, too, and we pay. But that's a last check for us, to catch things out-of-state that we might have missed, and to get a credit check. Our first check is our county's criminal and civil records and our state's unified records system.

If you're going to be local, there's very little comparison between being able to look at the actual court documents versus getting some kind of condensed report.

We also very carefully check social media. It's not so much the things that people say on their own Facebook, it's the things people's friends and relatives say that give you the bread crumbs you need to find more information.