Tenant screening options - alternatives to ZRM screening

[Yash Warke]

Hi friends,

I am a newbie real estate investor, and bought my first property in June 2023. Decent deal, and we worked to put a good tenant in ASAP. We used Zillow Rental Manager's (ZRM) in-built screening features to screen all applicants that applied through ZRM. ZRM claims to conduct identify verification through Experian, which passed for the tenant we ultimately chose, and she also showed her income records that had a 5.1x income-to-rent ratio. We signed the lease with her for 1 person.

She was a high maintenance tenant, in general. Fast forward 4 months, we find that while the first 3 months rent was sent on time, the 4th month rent was first told will be delayed, and when I pushed back, she communicated that she had moved out but there was someone living there who doesn't have a key but would leave a door or window unlocked to get in and out of the property. We first got her to officially sign a letter of lease termination (it wasn't worth our time to pursue a lawsuit on her to recover all the money she owed us), and went to the property, where we find that a man we didn't know lived there, who claimed that he was paying the rent for each month. When we asked him to leave, he started arguing with us that he is legally living there as he paid the rent every month. We called the cops on him, at which point he locked himself in and didnt turn up out even when the cops knocked on the door. Only when we called the towing agency to tow his car in the driveway (cop's suggestion), he turned up and along with him, came out one more man.

Long story short, we got scammed. The woman who signed the lease checked out fine in the ZRM screening process, but ultimately the folks who were paying the rent and possibly living there were different than her, and sounds like she had a fight with them, leading to a situation where she left them high and dry without an active lease. 

We are working on an intruder warrant (and if that doesn't work, a dispossessory action, but that takes a lot longer) to get the men out of the home - such a hassle!

I feel like kicking myself for only relying on ZRM screening before getting the tenant in. I should have collected her drivers license, SSN, address, etc. information and done offline background screening on her to see if it all checked out.

But the question for this group is what do you all do to screen your tenants? For those of you that use ZRM, do you rely on anything for tenant screening outside of the ZRM screening? Even if the tenant checks out initially, what is to stop the tenant from secretly bringing someone else in the home to live with them, who are unvetted and eventually become a headache for the landlord? Sure, we can go visit the property from time to time and conduct checks, but any advance warning can easily tip the unauthorized people to temporarily vacate the place. How do we make sure that only those who we screened and are officially on the lease stay in the property at any and all times? Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance.
Yash