Advice on the screening process

[Mark Eldridge]

Hey everyone at BP,

A little background about me is that I have owned/ managed 7 units for the past 5 years and had been pretty good at doing my own DD and selecting ideal tenants and haven’t had any issues. This past year with the Pandemic going on, I filled one of the units with a tenant that looked ideal on paper and all previous landlords had nothing but good things to say about them. This person clearly loved to play the system and long story short after about 4-5 months he did not turn out to be the ideal tenant I was looking for and am going through my first (unfortunately pretty inevitable) eviction process. 

I wanted to post because I’d like to find out what has work best and most efficient for people during their prescreening and screening process and just get some real world personal advice. I have read a lot of the posts already seen things on here that show the flow chart, old posts from years back and am just finishing up the book “Managing rental properties” by Brandon and Heather Turner. 

Previously what I had done was I would  post the ad with my criteria and standards for qualifying, showed the units in 20-30 minute intervals on same day to condense time spent going over and showing it, called references and made sure they had a verified job/ income. And asked if they would allow a background check but truthfully never did one as most people would run or not allow and that would be the red flag. I realize that I need to get a better system in place now to minimize the amount of time showing the apartment to bad candidates as well as no shows and really zone in digging deeper on potential tenants by doing credit/background checks.  

I’m looking to see what works best for people from the moment they post it (Facebook, Zillow, Craigslist, ect.) to screening, approving/ denying them with a denial letter to help me along my journey.

Any and all information is greatly appreciated and thank you for taking the time to read my situation.