My First Successful Tenant Screen!

[Ben Staples]

Hi Everyone,

This is my first ever forum post!

My short story: I had my first ever "Vacancy" and successfully filled it in one week! I put vacancy in quotes because I don't actually own the property; I am renting.

A little about me: I am two years out of college and renting in the Boston area. I had a curiosity about real estate all throughout high school and into college, but never took the time to look into it. Now that I'm out of college, I've been reading as much as I can, learning as much as I can, and am now searching for cash flowing multifamily (2-3 unit) properties to either house hack, or invest in. So far, no luck, but I believe with enough determination I will eventually be able to find a property. Until then, I will continue to rent.

Currently, I live in a duplex with a roommate from college, and my landlords living above us. It is a well-kept, beautiful property, and my landlords are a late 70s couple with a focus on enjoying life. Last month, my current roommate told me he was moving to New York to live with his girlfriend. PSH.

He has been a great roommate, and I was really bummed. What I was also down about was the prospect of giving up this immaculate apartment and great landlords. I had a decision to make: either look for a new place to live or try to find a roommate.

Option 1: Look for a new roommate I know, and stay at my current apartment: I asked college friends, posted on facebook, asked people at my J.O.B. and unfortunately had no luck. I wanted to get moving and find a solution fast, so I moved on to option 2.

Option 2: Look for a new place to live with people I know: I asked around, had a few soft leads. Eventually I went to check out a place, and while I believe I could get along with the people there, the quality of the apartment was a definite downgrade. There were reductions in amenities, space, and overall upkeep of the property that I couldn't overlook. PLUS, moving is a huge pain in the butt.

Option 3: Finding a Stranger: With a focus on a buy and hold strategy, I have read many tenant screening postings including **The Ultimate Guide to Screening Tenants** and decided to use this challenge as an opportunity to test what I was reading. I've used Craigslist maybe twice before this. I sold a few things, and have had no weird interactions to date. That being said, I've heard stories of the craigslist killer, and other nightmares, so I definitely had my guard up.

So I began on this quest. I took pictures of the apartment with my landlords permission, focusing on the exterior of the house for the cover shot, and turning on as many lights as possible inside to keep things bright. While I do photography on the side, I decided to use my iphone for simplicity and its wide angle. I looked at competitive ads, and tried to replicate what they were doing well, and improve on their weaknesses.

Within the first hours I got about six responses. I decided to use a trello board as a mini CRM for this experiment. For those of you familiar with trello, I created a few lists;

• "Email Lead" when an email comes in,
• "Questionnaire sent" when I emailed them my pre-screener,
• "Physical Visit" when they passed my prescreen and I scheduled an in person visit,
• "Awaiting Application" I gave an application to everyone that came to a physical visit
• "Application Received" When I received their application
• "Background check" when they passed the application review and were sent a background check request
• "To Landlords" when they passed the background check and now needed to be reviewed by the decision makers
• "To Deny" for anyone that did not meet criteria

If anyone wants to see what this trello board looks like, let me know

For the background check, I used the SmartMove program recommended in the ultimate guide to tenant screening and it worked very well. It was very convenient, and allowed the applicant pay the background check fee directly through the system.

Overall this experience was great, and I believe I have found an awesome new roommate. He moves in September so I won't know for sure until then. Hopefully he doesn't murder me.

A few things this has taught me

• Keeping a property well maintained is definitely enough to stop a tenant (me) from moving
• Paying for those extra finishing touches seems to not only command higher rents, but also get a higher quality of applicants (and I hope tenants)
• I very tightly scheduled individual showings. If I was looking for a pure tenant, and not a roommate, I would have definitely used a group showing approach, but because I wanted the chance to meet these people and find out if they were killers, I also needed to get to know them
• Finding a new roommate/tenant was an enjoyable experience. Maybe I have a future in property management…

Let me know if you have any feedback, comments, or questions