All Forum Posts by: Brett Babcock

This is all very good information. Thanks very much for your replies.

Hello everyone-- I am noticing a trend emerging in background checks, and I would love to get your opinion. We have started pre-screening people before a showing using an app called "Forewarn". This app finds and combines publically available data on tenant history, but does not meet the standards of a FCRA background screening, which basically means we aren't allowed to deny someone based on it's findings. Our goal with this app is to get an idea of who we are showing, whether they might pass our screening if they apply, and if there is any danger to the agent showing the apartment.

So far, I have noticed trends of criminal charges in Chicago & Cook County for things like theft and domestic battery with the disposition of "Nolle Prosequi", which I think means that they were brought up on charges, but the prosecutor declined to prosecute the case. Because they weren't prosecuted, it wont show up on a regular background check. These things would be an automatic denial if they applied and it was on their screening report.

What would you do in this situation? If I cancel the showing, I would have to make excuses that the unit was out of order or something, but we have many vacancies showing on different sites. They would know something was up. Would you show it hoping that credit or something else would result in a denial? In Chicago, and perhaps Cook County as well, people with criminal backgrounds have rights when it comes to housing, and this could potentially get us into hot water.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Originally posted by @Beau Fannon:

Are are you willing to pay an expediting fee up to 3%?

 Potentially, but it wouldn't be ideal.

I remember seeing that with Cosy.

We have a 275 unit portfolio in Chicago. We currently use Quickbooks Enterprise for financial tracking, and we do ACH rent collections for about 40% of our tenants manually through our bank's website. We don't currently have a formal system for tenant tracking / leasing / renewals etc. Just basically a bunch of excel spreadsheets. As you can imagine, this makes things very labor intensive and prone to error.

My dilemma is this: 

The owners love Quickbooks. The reporting for financial items is very robust and highly customizable. It does have its limitations with property management tasks though. I would love to have a system that seamlessly does the rental cycle from start to finish, has a tenant portal for payments, and has a good report generation functionality. I have found it easy to locate a system for the first two items, but not the last. 

All of the systems I have tested for small to medium sized companies have weak reporting functions. For example, I tested a system yesterday that will let you define and enter custom fields for tenants (like if they have a pet, etc), but you cant run a report based on those fields. So if I wanted to run a tenant contact list and have a notation on the list for pets, it wouldn't be able to do that. With Quickbooks, if I have a custom field for pets for a tenant, I can make it appear on any tenant report if I wanted to. 

Does anyone have suggestions on a system that has a strong reporting feature?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

I am in the process of trying to get a resident portal set up for online rent payments. We have a 275 unit portfolio in Chicago. It seems like most of the low cost or free sites have about a 5 day deposit time for payments. Does anyone know of a payment processor with a faster turnaround time?

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. 

@Mark Ainley Wow, I was hoping this person at ComEd was mistaken, but apparently not. Luckily we are looking at this in advance and not as a building code violation so we have a little time to look at options. 

Thank you very much for the info.

Brett

There are also FCRA (Fair Credit Reporting Act) requirements for something like this. If a file or list is maintained on tenants that is accessible to others outside your organization to make rental decisions, it is subject to the FCRA. Definitely research landlord responsibilities under the Act.

We manage a 105 unit 1927 vintage building that used to be a hotel (a long time ago). Since the building was new, there has only been one master meter for the whole building, and we include electricity in the rent. We are needing to upgrade our ComEd connection to get a higher load due to increased usage. ComEd is saying that in order for us to do that, each individual apartment must be metered separately. Does this sound right? In order for this to happen, we would have to install over a hundred meters, make wiring changes, and re-write all of our leases! I could find nothing in Chicago building codes, or in ComEd documentation that requires this.

Any suggestions?