A tenant background check is a basic procedure used by residential landlords or the property manager to find potential tenants. The primary aim to conduct a background check is to find the prospective tenant who agrees to make the lease terms or then till the contract.
A background check, if conducted properly, would help you find prospective tenants who would prove to be a good investment for your business. But the problem is most of the property owners or landlords simply unaware of this procedure. Such residential landlord doesn’t know about the essentials that need to be added in a tenant background check.
Due to lack of knowledge, sometimes you have to conduct background tenant checks twice or even thrice for the same tenants; this process not Only Results in wastage of time but also costs you a lot of money. Thus it is essential to know the basic requirements that need to adhere in order to carry out a successful tenant background check.
Here we have shortlisted some guidelines, which you need to keep in mind while conducting a tenant background check.
Limit the volume
It means the applicants that are unqualified for your vacancy. It should be done as ugly as possible to save time and effort. Thus one should review the rental application of the applicant before conducting a pending background check. Suppose you notice glaring problems such as no references, lack of supporting documentation, unexplained gaps in rental history, insufficient income, and etcetera. In that case, there is no point in wasting time on that application.
Gather more and more information
As a property manager, you must try to gather more and more information about the prospective tenant. The information may include a person’s date of birth, marriage certificate if they have undergone any, and most importantly, check the criminal records that have been filed against such person in past years and so on. All such information would help you to know that applicant personally. Make sure that all the information recorded on the application form is authentic.
Crosscheck the information
You cannot rely on the tenant background search and never treat the information you get through this check as final and correct. As a property manager, you should gather more information on that person from other sources. In this way, you can cross-check that applicant with your background records to confirm that the information given by the provider is correct or not.
You can never blindly trust what someone tells you in a credit check report.
Review past rental history
When reviewing the past tenant record, you not only records the last place where the potential tenant lived, but you have to search for many other details. You can ask for some queries from the previous landlord-
- Did you pay the rent on time?
- Did any of your payments pending?
- How much was the rent earlier?
- Did they cause any damage to the property?
- How much deposit did they make?
Conclusion
All such guidelines would help conduct a successful background check.
