During the rental process, we independently keep track of: The leads who contact usNamePhone numberEmail address (if provided)How they contacted us (Zillow, Trulia, CL, Hotpads, etc.)Any other details we deem pertinent.It may be overkill, maybe it could help us prevent and/or investigate/report this kind of fraud if we need to.It sounds like we need to step up our game the next time we list these properties.

Not always preventable, but also good to prepare your tenants and take precautions.

I'm not married to the list, I was more trying to prevent people saying small towns like Fayetteville, NC or Huntsville, AL.

There's nothing you can do to prevent this and honestly you are merely wasting money.

The first pillar is avoiding unnecessary and risky activities (don't drink and drive, insurance generally won’t cover your poor decisions) and take good care of your investments(maintain your property, etc) - these simple steps will help you prevent lawsuits before they even occur.

A person mentioned this could be due to preventing others from lowballing if the original offer falls through.

We would plan to keep our current home and rent it out as well if we did this.I appreciate your insight on the tenant-landlord relationship, makes sense to target a better quality neighborhood to hopefully prevent some of those issues.

After 10 years of hosting, I don't spend much time each month on my 4 STRs, but newbies who like to watch their cameras, obsess about a lot of (often unnecessary) details, and pile on a bunch of tech (channel managers, dynamic pricing tools, etc.) all at once will spend MUCH more in time, and that's worth something for sure.

For my small size it seemed unnecessary and I didn't see the benefit in the small companies for a small time guy like myself.What I do is I can collect rent through Venmo (free), I have a tennant application embedded into my website (cognito forms...also free) I screen tennants through mysmartmove.com (Transunion's company gives you credit report, background, criminal, eviction etc. and tennant pays for the screening so also free.) 

They don't respect you, prevent you from ever leaving and prevent you from controlling your own credit card.This was a total trap.