Tenant screening info needed

[Debasish Bhattacharjee]

Hi Experts,

I have posted my rental listing in Northern California /Bay Area location using zillow and avail.co. Both has tenant screening and I posted in my listing clearly to apply first followed by touring after shortlisting potential prospects. 7 days listed, 50 application till now, 7+ applicant are prospects, 4 weeks I have before tour, as of today there are 7 homes available in the market for roughly same moving date (first week of July).

Given this above statistics, there are few applicants they are personally emailing me. 

Type 1 category: their request is to meet me in person, then look at the property, if they like then they submit the application. 

Type 2 category: They are hesitant to submit application through zillow, instead they want to provide me W2s , credit report in person to me. 

Should I not consider those applicant since touring is only available after a month and by that time who knows the shortlisted ones as of today might have changed their plans?

I don't want to loose those applicants who doesn't want to apply through zillow. What should I do? Should I take their document for review or should I always go through zillow? If they provide recent credit report will it not work? Need some input here.

Thanks

-Debasish

[Doug Smith]

There's a lot tied up in these questions.

First, regarding showings:  Your lease should have a clause in it that you can show the property on 24 hours notice, so I'm not clear why your current tenant is saying people can't come see the property. You don't explain why you aren't showing the property yet.  I generally aim for 60 days notice periods in my lease.  If they aren't renewing, that triggers a "preliminary walk through" to get a general sense of the property.  This allows me to gauge whether I'm going to have a lot of work to do before making it available again, or it's just a quick clean and turnaround to the next tenant.  I then let the tenant know that I'm going to be showing the place and try to coordinate some preferred times.  I like to do an "open house" on weekends, vs. scheduling a lot of on-off tours, if possible.

Regarding process... Personally, I let people see the property before they apply.  Someone has to pay $29 to apply through Zillow.  Think about that from the tenant's perspective- "Normal Tenants" might look at 10-20 properties before they find one they want. Who wants to spend $30 x 20 = $600 just to look at a bunch of places?  Add to this- if you're well-to-do, you tend to be very cautious about sharing your SSN, W2, and credit information. (It's just as easy to post a fake rental listing as it is to forge a W-2).  So wealthy tenants likely want to see a property before applying for privacy reasons.  So, I wouldn't require people to apply before showing the property. 

Regarding forgeries and documents- if you want to protect yourself there, you could let people submit those docs to you now, but let them know that they will need to submit via Zillow if they like the place and want to formally apply.  One note about receiving credit information outside of the system- you create some risks/ liability for yourself by receiving such information.  You have a duty to protect the confidential information of all applicants (not just the person who eventually rents from you).  If your email is compromised, you could have an obligation to report to all of your prior applicants that their information may be at risk.  For that reason alone, I suggest having a separate email account that you use only for the business.

Good luck