Tenant screening is an essential part of any estate agent/ landlord’s hunt. This screening process gives you the chance to vet potential tenants, ensuring their suitability. You should follow a screening process carefully, to make sure you pick the right tenants.
Step 1: Pre-screening questions
Before spending time and money on the full screening process, you should ask a few questions to help weed out any undesirable characters. Many landlords choose to add a few application questions for potential tenants to answer right after their viewing.
Step 2: Collect tenant information
A basic rental application will tell you many of the things you need to know about your potential tenants. Some things you may want to ask are:
Where have they lived before
Who will they live with in your property
Where do they work and how much do they earn
What’s their financial history (ie. what is their credit score, have they ever filed for bankruptcy)
Step 3: Complete a full background check
Once you’ve got a better idea of potentially approved tenants, you should complete a full background check with an external company. This check will assess their credit history, their eviction history and their criminal history.
Step 4: Reference checks
The background check will have provided a great amount of information, but there are still a few other things you can do to get the whole picture. You could talk to a past landlord, talk to the tenant’s boss, and talk to the tenant themselves, to get a better idea of who you are potentially housing.
Step 5: The final review
Once you’ve collected all the information you possibly can, it’s time to make a decision. Consider everything you have found out, and then contact the lucky/ unlucky applicants to let them know of your decision.
If you need any help with tenant screening we are more than happy to chat you through the process.
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