It’s common for people to think that being a landlord is all fun and games. But if you manage a property, you must already know the amount of work you have to do just to consistently earn an income.
One of these steps is screening your tenants. As the foundation of the rental process, this sets up the stage for how your tenants might behave in the future and how smoothly your experience goes with them.
To help you ace this challenge, here’s a quick landlord’s guide to tenant screening.
Decide If You Want Long-Term Tenants
Many people go through a guide for finding short-term accommodation, while others want a place they can call home for years. While renting your place, you have to decide which of these settings works better for you. From there, you can approach the screening process that fits either of these rental methods. It’s because short-term rentals can find tenants that are pre-screened through the vacation rental app, while long-term rentals typically need you to do the work.
Find a Screening Service
In case you are going with a long-term rental, you should find a tenant background screening service to do the necessary checks for you. These solutions take the burden of checking your tenant’s credit history and rental history, which gives you a clear idea of their financial responsibility. This also helps you figure out if you can trust a tenant with making their rental payments on time and if they would have any potential problems.
Go Past the Basics
During the screening process, you should make sure to not only check the potential tenant’s credit score and rental history, but also look into other factors like their criminal history. This makes sure that you are looking into anything that could cause issues for you in the future. After learning how background check works, you can easily ask the firm that is handling the process for you to examine these factors as well.
Define Your Own Criteria
Besides the basics like credit, rental, and criminal history, you can also define your own criteria for the ideal tenant. For example, if you want your rental to go to an expanding family, you may prefer choosing tenants that are a couple. But if you’d rather not have too much traffic, you can also choose to hand your property to a student. You can use something as simple as a notes app to remember these details.
Put Together a Rental Application
Once you are done defining the ideal tenant in your head, you can move forward with putting together a rental application. You can create this application in a forms app that helps you easily build forms with your required details, but without asking for too much tech knowledge. You may then email these forms or print them out for potential tenants who want to rent your property.
Have a Meeting With Your Tenants
If an application really strikes out to you, you can choose to have a meeting with your possible tenant. This takes you from knowing your potential tenant on paper to getting to learn more about them. The ideal scenario here is to have this meeting in person. But if your rental is in another city or you don’t find the time for a visit, you can also do it over a virtual meeting platform.
Verify Their References
This is a tedious but necessary part of tenant screening. When you ask for references in your tenant application, you should also be ready to verify them. This ensures that you are confirming your new tenant’s employment and residential history through various sources. In case you cannot handle this process yourself, you can explore the benefits of real estate consulting firms or management companies who can take on this task for you. By going through this quick how-to, you can know the steps you need to take in order to find your ideal tenants. But you should remember to continue making checks and repairs on your property to do your part as a landlord and protect your stream of income.
