Do you always verify tenants income?

[Fili Aguirre]

Do you always verify tenants income? Is it necessary asking your prospective tenant to provide proof of income, like a bank statement and recent paystub? And require that the applicant provides you with 2-3 employee references?

[Chris Mason]

If what you are asking for, for a 12 month lease, is beyond what we ask for on a 30 year mortgage, something is probably amiss. :) You can probably think back to what was requested the last time you got a mortgage as a good starting point (where do you think all the "standard" criteria used by landlords ultimately came from? :P ).

A paystub, and last year's W2 to validate a history of income at that level, is reasonable. Verifying income with the current employer, at a publicly listed phone number (to ensure it's not their buddy's cell phone number) is also reasonable... anything larger than a lemonade stand with 1 employee is going to have a "verification of employment" process that you can use, the authorization form to use it you just include in your tenant application package. I know a lot of landlords don't do this last part, but it's easy, and you're plugging into an existing framework (the same framework already used when those employees apply for mortgages).

Asking for 2-3 employment references as a standard thing is not reasonable, especially not if they've been at their current job for some time.

Asking for bank statements to validate income as a standard thing isn't accurate (since a buddy could just dump cash in there), but as a one-off for a specific reason it could be reasonable. Back when I was in college and a renter, with the GI Bill as my income, I showed him a few months of bank statements showing once-a-month deposits of exactly $2345.67 from "Dept of Veterans Affairs," along with a) a print-out showing E-5 BAH in the zip code of my school was exactly $2345.67 and b) a print-out from a credible public source showing that veterans in college on the GI Bill do not get paystubs. So that reasonable landlord lined all that up, it made sense, and they rented to me on that basis.