Property Manager Studio City

 Myths About Tenant Screening

a handful of important steps go into finding the right tenant for your property. Within each of these tenant screening steps, landlords must ensure that they’re playing by the rules — while not getting misled or fooled in the process.

Tenant screening is all about finding the highest quality tenants for your property. With rental applications, background checks, and credit checks, it can quickly become overwhelming. Make the tenant screening process easier on yourself by getting the facts straight. Rentalutions is here to help. We’ve debunked 10 common myths about tenant screening.

“As long as they pay the rent, nothing else matters.”
It’s important to find a tenant who will pay the rent, hands down. For this reason, be sure to run thorough background and credit checks and ask them questions related to their current and previous employment situations. Performing online credit checks makes it so much easier. Find out more about them here.

But there are several other traits to look for in a potential tenant to ensure that they will treat you, your property, and their neighbors with respect. You want to look out for professionalism, reliability, and general friendliness. Of course, you won’t always be able to readily extract these characteristics of someone in an initial meeting, but if you follow our Five Stages of a Good Screening Process, you’re likely to have a much better sense of the person you’ll soon be renting to.

“You can deny any applicant who doesn’t have a social security number.”
While a social security number is necessary to produce a credit report, there are some individuals who may not be assigned such a number. People who are residing in the United States for only a brief period of time, such as a foreign exchange student or an employee here on a visa, for example, won’t have a SSN.

However, they should be able to provide you with an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN), and this number will work for obtaining a credit report.

“Renting to a couple or two roommates is better than renting to one tenant.”
We go through most of our lives thinking two is better than one, but when it comes to tenants, it may be just the opposite. Signing on with a couple may seem promising — especially if they each hold stable jobs and are able to show proof of steady income each month.

However, there’s always the risk of a breakup, fight, or mid-lease move, which could leave one of the tenants — and potentially you — in a big bind when they walk with their half of the rent.

“You can’t deny an applicant if they’re not in the U.S. legally.”
As a landlord or property manager, you have a right under the Federal Fair Housing Act to ask a potential tenant for proof of U.S. citizenship. You may do so using a Form I-9, available on the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services website.

However, it’s important to keep in mind that you may not selectively ask potential tenants for this documentation. If you ask one applicant for such information, you must ask them all.

“They have a small pet, so there won’t be any problems.”
So you’ve read our guide on allowing pets on premises, and you’ve determined that they’re acceptable so long as they’re small (under 50 pounds). Your potential tenant has a four-legged counterpart that fits the bill, which might seem perfect. However, it’s important to remember that pets are pets, regardless of their size, breed, age, and so on.

They are still able to cause stains, scratch floors and walls, and bark incessantly, ultimately becoming a big concern in keeping the peace with neighbors. As much as you may want to acquiesce to a potential tenant’s situation, be sure to take into consideration all of these factors before deciding that you’re on board with pets of any size in your unit.

“They have a high credit score, so they’ll definitely be a good tenant.”
Credit scores are certainly important figures in determining your potential tenant’s payment history and habits, so it’s vital to do a credit check. FICO scores range from 300-850, and, generally speaking, you’ll want that score to be at or higher than 650. Even if your renter has a through-the-roof credit score, though, don’t call off the search just yet. Check out our guide for more on how to interpret a tenant’s credit report.

Just because a tenant has paid their bills on time and avoided late fees doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll be quiet after 1 a.m. or take care of your property respectfully. Therefore, it’s important to get a better sense for the renter and their disposition during an in-person interview session before any signing occurs, as outlined in our post about Approving and Rejecting Tenants the Right Way.

“The landlord should be responsible for the costs of the credit check.”
In most states, it’s legal to charge a fee to conduct the credit check, and this fee would cover the check itself, along with the time and energy you put into the process. In most cases, this fee runs from about $30-$50. Some states enforce a maximum screening fee — for example, in California, this fee is around $35 per applicant.

“If the applicant provides their own credit report, you must accept it.”
If a potential tenant is applying to multiple rental properties, they may not want to eat the costs involved each time a landlord requires a copy of their credit report. Applicants may acquire their own report and present this to you, but you are not required to accept it.

Unless, that is, you’re in Wisconsin, which requires landlords to accept applicant-produced credit reports, so long as they were obtained within the past 30 days.

“You can judge a book by its cover.”
It’s illegal to discriminate in the screening process by only obtaining credit reports from certain applicants or by implementing a higher rent for applicants based on their ethnicity, gender, age, or another protected class. If you decide to do your research on one applicant, be sure to carry over the process for all of them.

“It’s OK to deny someone a lease based on questionable findings from a Google search.”
So you’ve covered the background check and credit report and everything checks out, but upon putting your potential tenant’s name into Google, you’re surprised to find a wealth of information, from their partying habits to their religion.

While you may not always like what you see, it’s important to remember that if you deny someone a lease based on such findings, you might be faced with a discrimination lawsuit. If in the rare case, however, you discover details online that may be incongruous with the information the renter completed in your rental application, you may use these findings to make a decision about the tenant. However, even this method runs the risk of backfiring, so proceed with caution when it comes to independent tenant screening online research.

Tenant screening is arguably one of the most important things a landlord performs. After all, if you find a responsible and respectful tenant who always pays rent on time, you won’t have much trouble later on.

From: https://www.rentalutions.com

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