All Forum Posts by: Julie E.

Does anyone have advice on how the process should work when you have multiple prospective tenants interested in a property? We posted a unit for rent and have received around 15 replies so far. Okay, a lot of questions here...

Do we ask everyone for an application fee and do background checks on everyone? Or do we just go in order from the replies we received? If multiple applicants meet requirements, is there a "legal" way in which you must choose who would get to be the tenant...like, do you have to go in order from the first person who contacted you who also qualifies or can you pick based on which applicant you feel would be the "best fit" based on qualifications such as income, professionalism when doing a showing, references, etc? 

Also, knowing there are so many applicants, what if someone offered us a higher rent to be chosen for the vacancy? Do we then have to inform all of the others? How would something like this work?

Thank you so much for any help you can provide! 

A little background: For our first tenant we had to find, we used a rental company (and paid them one month's rent) and never thought about all of this. For the second tenant we had to find, we heard from a couple right away who qualified and just went with them. We've never been in this situation before, but I'm sure some of you have and might have some advice?

Thanks, all, for the help! I've been to the sites you've linked to and they seem to be very helpful. Nicole, I would love it if you could send me an example application that you've created. Can that be done through the site or do you need my email? Thanks!!

Hello! My husband and I have a duplex that we rent out. We are currently renting 1/2 of it and re-doing the other half. We lived in the other half until recently and now have another place to live so are re-doing it to make it nicer and more marketable for the next tenant. Last time when we found tenants, we hired a company to find the tenants for us. They received applications, showed the place, and created the lease. We had to pay them about one month's rent for this service. It worked out really well at the time, but we are thinking now we should just do it ourselves. Does anyone have a check list of things that we need to do in order to find a tenant? Here are some items I'm aware of, but need to know more about each one and am probably missing some steps.

-Advertise property for rent (local FB page for our community, local list serv, Craigslist?)

-Schedule times with people to see place? Make private appointments or have open house?

-Credit check? No idea how to do this, but assume there are some resources out there?

-Draft a lease. We already have one for the other side, so would just plan on updating that one.

Appreciate any help people can provide! :)