How to Screen Tenants

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.