All Forum Posts by: Sarnen Steinbarth

@Account Closed  Sure I'll follow up with a DM.

Hi @Account Closed

Are you looking for just criminal background checks, or credit / criminal / eviction?

For finding tenants I'd recommend:

- Posting on Craigslist

- Syndicating the listing our to the major online websites (rent.com, apartments.com, etc.)

- Possibly a yard sign (depending upon vehicle / foot traffic that would see it).

Make sure to price it correctly, have lots of pictures and a decent description in the advertisement.

Feel free to message me with any additional questions.

One of the main advantages of SmartMove / TransUnion is they provide all of the primary tenant screening reports (Credit / Criminal / Eviction) in one.  This allows them to cross-match records from credit and criminal to reduce false-positive criminal hits on applicants (compared to a service that uses Experian, for example, that does not provide criminal records).

Much easier to accurately get a criminal record for "John Smith" when you can cross reference attributes from their criminal and credit files.  (Versus a company only pulling credit, or only pulling criminal).

This was one of the reasons why we decided to partner with them, as accurate records was very important to the landlords that use our service.

@Vincent M.

Here are a few tips I'd recommend

• Make sure you do a good job marketing your unit, so you have enough applicants to have a solid set of criteria / standards.
• Utilize an online rental application to easily collect application information
• Make sure you pull credit, criminal and eviction reports
• Familiarize yourself with federal and state landlord-tenant laws as well as fair housing laws.

Feel free to message direct for specifics on any of these.

@Vincent P.

Another great option if you want to save some time is to have them apply first and do the basic credit / criminal screening, but discount the application fee off the first month's rent if they end up moving in.  This way you can have the basics on the applicant prior to showing and do a more in-depth screen / reference calls after they see it.

Also if safety is a concern having basic information on the renter prior to a showing greatly reduces any safety risk.

This also gives you the advantage of not wasting time showing the unit to less-than-serious or unqualified applicants.

Of course you have to do a good job at marketing the unit so you have enough people interested to be able to request application first.

We've found this to be a very popular combination for our landlords.

@Becky Y.

Are you primarily looking at it for rent payment services, or are there other features like marketing / listing website / screening / printable flyers, etc that you are looking for in a software?

@Jestin Sorenson

SmartMove, and more specifically TransUnion, is an industry-leading solution and one of the major 3 credit bureaus -it's for this reason we integrated with them ourselves. 

Are you looking for just a tenant screening platform?  Do you already have solutions for marketing, online applications, rent payments, etc?

And relating to your comment:

All of this assuming they pass a credit/background check, but I'd rather not even get their hopes up by letting them fill out an app and wasting their time and money if this isn't a good fit. Thoughts?

Honestly I think you'll find that most of the better tenants will not have an issue applying and paying the application fee.  While the tenants that know they won't pass a background / credit check likely will weed themselves out.  So I would not be too concerned about a bad tenant wasting their money to fill out an application.

If anything, to help mitigate this, be upfront with your requirements for tenancy (600+ credit score, etc.) - then it's really not on you if they turn out to not meet the criteria.

Hope this helps . . .

Hi @Brian Akers,

There are a handful of online services, ours included, where you can have a tenant apply online, pay the app fee, get screening results and move your process to an online one.

The one aspect that would not be common would be to upload your pdf - typically the entire rental application will become an online form.  Though you should be able to add some custom questions, so not using your specific pdf I wouldn't imagine would be a problem, it should have the same benefits you're looking for.

If you are needing to specifically use your PDF then you'd most likely need to host it online and use a service like DocuSign for tenants to complete it.  But it wouldn't be integrated with tenant screening, so I would imagine a fully-online application might work better for you.

Hope this helps.

 I teach real estate agents and property managers - and a consistent complaint I hear from them on the pro's and con's of their software (that they use for being a property manager / landlord) is accounting.  I think this really varies between software service, but I do think it is hard to have a really great landlord software, that is also a really great accounting software.

Accounting software's like Quickbooks and Xero are complicated enough to do well, as are landlord software's.  Hard to find one that does both well.

Off the top of my head I don't have a specific list of XYZ, but usually the more sophisticated accounting practices like transferring balances, vendor credits, cash vs. accrual, etc. are what I hear that are the most common complaints.

@Vitaliy Merkulov

The CA law regarding what is and is not brokerage activities starts here:

http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_disp...

I won't give an opinion on the legality, but I hope this helps. . .