I have a huge heart and while I've trusted people and had regrets I still consider each applicant based on what I get out of the personal interview.
People do run into financial problems and it is not always their fault. Personally, I would give an applicant many stars if he has 12 months of rent to pay in advance because if he trusts you enough to fork over 12 months of rent then I feel compelled to trust him. This is where I start to has the applicant many questions and even ask what his battle plan is to pay rent after the 12 months.
As stated several times, I own several apartment buildings, never did a credit check and we only end up taking one tenant to court for an eviction about every 3 to 5 years. We had one tenant with one child and she was a nurse. She was making $60 per hour, was working 2 jobs and was making more than $12,000 per month. She even brought in a credit report she obtained from somewhere and she had nothing negative on her report.
What happened. This tenant paid us $1350 for the first month's rent with and a $1350 security deposit with a credit card. She moved in and then put a stop to the payment on the credit card because she said the credit card belonged to someone else. So, we evicted her and ended up taking her to court. It took about 4 months to get her locked out of the apartment and we lost almost $10,000. So, 'Poop Happens'. It turned out she really was earning $12,000 per month, but she was also a professional scammer who lives in apartments for free and it did not show up on her credit report. We copied the report and have in in our files. What good did the credit report do for this situation.
We got burned a few time, but we do very well by evaluating everyone like they are a human being and not we don't call them APPLICANTS. We call them someone interested in renting from us. We personally prefer to collect our rents every month from our tenants vs. some sort of electronic payment system because it gives us the opportunity to humanize the way we deal with our tenants and it gives us the opportunity to be more friendly and allow our tenants to tell us about their personal and maintenance issues e.g. tenants will tell forewarn us about health issues e.g. we've had several tenants who had liver problems and they expected to pass away within a few months. By collecting the rents from these tenants this allowed us to understand their situation and work with them and their relatives in regards to paying their rent and we never had a problem where a tenant passed away and did not pay their rent until their possessions were moved out.
Many times, a tenant has a medical problem and can't pay their rent for a month or two because they have to go into the hospital and then they have to recover. By collecting the rents, personally, we get to know these tenants better and we feel more comfortable trusting them and we never have a problem where our tenants stiff us for the rent with the exception of the one eviction lawsuit every few years and that is an expectation in the rental business whether or not you do through credit checks.
