Landlord doesnt know their Property

[Jerome Kaidor]

Hello,

One of my least favorite tasks is checking out prospective tenants. At the level I rent at, I don't have the luxury of just running their credit and looking at their FICO. With rare exceptions ( count on the fingers of one hand ), ALL my applications have bad credit of one kind or another. I rely heavily on phone calls.

If there's a phone number on that app, I call it. I talk to their friends, their parents, their landlord, their former landlords etc. If and only if I'm happy with the phone calls, I run their credit/criminal/eviction.

When I talk to a landlord, one of my tasks is to convince myself that he or she is actually a landlord, and not just a friend or cousin of the tenant. I try to do this as delicately as possible - after all, the landlord hasn't applied for anything. Just a few casual questions - "Say, how many units you got there?" If they can't answer that off the top of their head, they ain't the landlord.

Well, I just talked to such a one. Lady doesn't have a clue. Says "I'm not out there much". "It's really my husband's thing". Hmmm.

My ace in the hole for such things is my RE broker. Called her up - "Say, who owns this place, anyway?" She looked it up, gave me the names - totally different. It had sold in May. I googled the old owner and called him. He referred me to the management company. The management company answered yes&no questions: "Did she owe you money?" Yes. More than $500? Yes. More than $1000? "Yes". More than $2000? "About that".

One more bullet dodged.....

- Jerry Kaidor

[Rob K.]

I just took an application the other day from a woman who seemed very nice. Good stable job with excellent income. Her credit report was fairly clean with a score over 600. I called her current landlord who was listed on the application who said wonderful things about her. Almost too good. Her current apartment was about a mile away from the house I was renting. I drove to it and saw a for rent sign out front. It had a different number than she listed. When I called that number, I was told a completely differetn story about this applicant/deadbeat.

Sometimes you need to put your detective hat on.