Tenant Screening Tip...

[Craig Rismiller]

Just wanted to share with the BP community a couple of tips that came into great use while screening a perspective tenant:

1. If available online, check with the county assessor who actually owns the property and make sure that matches the owner on the application. There are other questions that you can ask the 'landlord' on the app to verify this; but this is a good double check. Suprise suprise I was given a false landlord name and phone number today!

2. Check your counties online court records to see if your tenant is the process of being evicted. If they want to move in immediately there is normally a reason. Your traditional background check wont normally pick up pending evictions, so it is great to check the case history of the county court. This simple check showed me today that my rockstar applicant making $12,500 per month just has his forceable retainer (i.e. eviction) hearing yesterday!

Lesson for everyone...in additon to the other tools in tenant screening, determine what local online assets you have to do some free and simple checks before you go too far down the path of doing a full verification!