All Forum Posts by: Ariel O.

Who has a more stable income? Who has more income? Who has paid the rent on time more often?  Those are the questions I would ask. Damage is harder to assess unless you can do a thorough walk through.

For initial screening you need an application form, and the specific FCRA disclosures. California also has a specific requirement under state laws for their application form. You don't need a lease form until after you've screened the applicant and are ready to get it signed.

@Account Closed

I actually agree with you on most parts. If you have 10 applicants and 1 meets your criteria better then others, you're going to take that 1. My concern here was more for the owner and prospective tenant. 

For the owner: Why is there not a clear address history report showing all of the known addresses of the tenant? That makes it a lot easier to figure out what's going on. 

What makes it even more frustrating is that I see/hear about this all the time. Meaning a landlord/prop manager using a service, and not knowing where the data is coming from or what it means. I have spoken to property managers who have lost thousands for want of  a simple AKA search.

Also, if someone is that invested in a tenant's report, perhaps they're in a less in demand market, and they want to be sure they reject a tenant.

For the prospective tenant: their life is getting screwed over because of a less then thorough company. Not everyone takes what they do seriously, or realizes the impact they have on peoples lives.

@Georges A.

Did they do an address search based off of the SSN?

Is the name a common name?

How was the search for judgments done? While I appreciate @Account Closed point out the obvious: there can be  false positives on these searches. You need to do a little bit more digging if you don't have a wide applicant pool. If you have a number of applicants and the rest are clean, that makes your course of action easier.

The gold standard would be to search these databases by SSN; unfortunately, most of the states and counties have gotten rid of SSNs in their court records, so you can't search by them anymore. Most companies will just do a name search and spit back everything they get. 

Unfortunately most Landlords have a lot of blind trust in their screening and don't know exactly how and where companies get their data from. I would call up whomever you used for the search and ask them:

• How do they run their search - is it cross matched against address history and known locations of the tenant? Do they search by SSN or name? 
• Where do they get their data from and how frequently is it updated?

Good luck!

@Craig C.

Even if you aren't able to collect the judgment, having the judgment on file will at least help other Landlords make better decisions about these people. Almost like Karma/paying it forward. That's assuming they search judgments independently, anyway.

To me it sounds like you had a bad agent.

That being said you should be able to get a decent response rate through the Zillow network + Craigslist. Also take a look at padmapper.

Make sure to pre-qualify your tenants to save you a lot of grief and wasted time.

@Justin B.

Is it Automated? How quickly does it come in once you post?

@Mark Kvam

Expenses seem a bit high to me, especially given it's tenant owned. Can you break it down more? (@Bruce May:agree or disagree?)

@Steve Rozenberg

You know the answer to that one :P What problems are you experiencing? Chances are I've heard em all.

@John T.

Evictions will either end up in a separate evictions database (assuming whoever you use for tenant screening is hooked up to it), and usually will hit credit in the judgment section.

Only Caveat is if final judgment is not rendered (cash for keys type deals) - those don't show up.

Ask @James Wise about all things Cleveland