Tenant Screening Services and Background Checks
Credit Reports
Eviction Records
Criminal Records
Sex Offender Searches
Employment Verifications
Easy to Use. Screen your potential tenants fast and accurately.
No Downloads. No Membership Fees. Just great service at a low cost.
Sign up for Tenant Training Camp
Jefferson Community College is offering Tenant Training workshops for everyone involved in the rental industry, including tenants, landlords, property managers and building and property owners.
This is an original and creative method of helping out tenant and landlords. We have always stressed the importance of understanding the rental laws of your community, as well as State and Federal. Jefferson Community is providing a great resource to their local community, and we hope more cities and towns follow their lead.
They stressed in the article the importance of establishing a business relationship with your tenant/landlord, instead of seeking a friendship. This is a business situation and “friendships” can feel betrayed by some factors that are out of your control as a landlord. They recommend establishing the business relationship right away to avoid any awkwardness later.
Source of Credit Reports
One of the ways of establishing that business connection is to begin with a formal tenant screening program. The applicant is required to sign a release form, and will undergo a standardized background check based on your requirements, which may include a credit history report, eviction records, employment verification, as well a criminal record search. Obtaining credit reports on your potential tenants requires an initial site inspection of your office premises, to protect credit data against potential fraud. You may be tempted to allow your tenants to bring in a downloaded version of a credit report. While this is expedient, you are exposing yourself to potential modified documentation. The power of Photoshop is hard to decipher. We recommend you obtain credit reports using your tenant screening provider.
Check out your landlords financial strength
According to news-press.com, there’s is a growing problem for Florida condominium associations regarding non-paying unit owners who have tenants living in their unit. These unit owners are behind on their HOA fees and yet Florida law provides that the utilities cannot be disrupted to the tenant living in the unit. There is a bill before Florida legislature looking into this issue. Should it pass, tenants in Florida need to made aware, and possibly run background checks on their unit owners to determine their financial strength.
Desperate Times
These are desperate times, and more than ever you need to start tapping into your a survivalist instinct. Think of life as an episode of “Man vs. Wild” But instead of wandering through a Siberian Forest, you are moving through your world on the brink of an apocalypse. You can save yourself time and money by relearning street smarts. The stories of older relatives who survived the depression are more relevant than ever. Now is the time to think carefully about every financial relationship you build, which bank you decide to use, what landlord you want to rent from, want tenant you want to rent to, and the quality and reputation of every business relationship you cultivate.
More local governments encouraging tenant screening
As the recession moves from Wall Street to Main Street, local cities are forced to deal with the affects, with shrinking tax revenue. We were all hopefull during the housing boom that blighted parts of town would be regentrified, and the blight would be replaced by a white picket fence and an interest only mortage.
Backsliding into chaos
Now, as new housing projects falter and the money dries up, more areas are backsliding into blight and neglect. Municipalities are concerned about rising crime, particularly crimes of desperation including muggings, burglary, etc. More cities are focused on the need for maintaining or improving the quality of their large multi-comples housing. Carroll County Landlords Association is hosting a conference on tenant screening on April 2th, to help landlords learn about what services are all available to them.
During this hard economic times, it’s reviewing your tenant screening policy. Is it enough to jsut review your tenant’s credit report? Should you verify their employment using a qualified employment verifying expert? The paystub you see might just be the last one they got.
South Peoria moves towards tenant screening
The city of Peoria is looking to instate of $25 annual fee for all landlords to “keep an up-to-date annual registration list. That includes names, addresses and phone numbers of all landlords.”
Currently Landlords are required to register one time, and the city council has the list and outdated. The purpose of the updated information appears to be a step towards regulating a part of town that is blighted by “Furniture sticking out of doorways, broken windows and peeling paint are not uncommon sights along the 1800 block of Martin Street.”
There’s an ordinance, that says city inspectors are supposed to inspection rental properties once every three years, but this is not happening, and they are relying on “initial landlord-tenant screening as a more up-to-date assessment of a rental property’s condition.”
Interesting that the city is relying on the landlords tenant screening program to assess the property’s condition. The tenant screening solution should cover the criminal history, credit history, eviction history and possible employment history of the potential tenant. The landlords should also be instituted a complex wide safety measure to reduce and eliminate crime. Measures such as security guards (where appropriate) video cameras, and landlord walkthroughs can minimize this type of blight. But a screening program can’t always check for the safety of the building, or the trash or abandoned furniture. Landlords must get out in front of these problems before the problem escalates and reaches the local newspapers. Public Relations is an preventative measure as well as crisis management.
Chicago Sheriff to screen all 7000 employees
Public Relations is hard enough for landlords and property owners once a bad tenant moves in. But recently with the background check problem in Los Angeles, the Cook County Sheriff in Chicago has announced they will be screening all 7000 sworn and civilian employees of the Cook County Sheriff’s Department.
It will be interesting how the Cook County Sheriff’s Department proceeds with their background check program. They say “any sworn officer with a felony conviction can’t keep that post” Hopefully the Chicago police always conducting background checks on all officer candidates. It seems unlikely that a currently employed sworn officer could be convicted of a felony without their employer becoming aware of it. Not unless they took a leave of absence and went to California. The implication here is that the Sheriff’s Department probably didn’t conduct a comprehensive background check of all officer candidates, or the focus is on the civilian employees of the Department.
The sheriff’ s spokesman stated, “As for civilian employees, we’d look at it on a case-by-case basis.”
An employer should establish a firm screening policy for background checks to avoid any allegations of favoritism or discrimination. Also, for the civilian employees it seems the department must adhere to the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which would indicate they must ignore some crimes occurring more than seven years ago.
Hopefully the Chicago Police and the Cook County Sheriff’s Department are able to weed out any potential problems before it makes the papers.
Cook County
Chicago Police
Background Checks
Criminal Records
Apartment Owner responds to complaints about tenants
the TimesDaily.com had an article from Sheffield, Alabama today about an apartment complex owner responding to complaints about his tenants alleged drug use, shots being fired and other incidents that occurred at his complex, the Colbert Square Apartments, over the past nine years. The owner was forced to appear before the city council to address the complaints.
In response to residents’ complaints, the city will forward (the owner) reports of serious incidents so he can follow through with the tenants, including evicting them if necessary.
More than ever we are seeing communities starting to crack down on apartment complexes that seem to have a large amount of police responses. While the efforts of the community to reduce crime are noble, it seems possible that some apartment complex owners could be scapegoated based on one or two problem tenants. The lesson here is to avoid becoming the scapegoat bad apartment owner no matter what the actual facts are.
Don’t want until the city council calls to you respond to complaints. Make moves now to shore up your public relations by implementing and enforcing an effective tenant screening program that not only includes credit history checks but also a criminal history search and employment verification. Make your efforts visible and clear to the surrounding community. If necessary, hire security guards or install cameras to monitor activity in potential problem areas, like the parking lot, stairwells, and anywhere tenants will likely loiter. Publicize your efforts and your community public relations will improve. You might even be rewarded for your efforts to clean up the community.
tenant screening
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public relations
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More Tenant Screening in Little Canada
The city of Little Canada, Minnesota is the latest in American Cities looking to mandate tenant screening for all apartment owners in their municipal area. City Leaders are hoping the stricter tenant screening requirements will reduce the number of police related incidents and increase safety within the city limits, where half the residents live in rental housing.
“We think better tenant screening … should lead to less calls for police service, better tenant management and safer neighborhoods,” said Hanson, looking over the file that contained police data on problem properties spanning five years.
The ordinance will possibly be implemented later this winter. Property owners and rental managers should be aware that tenant screening tools are readily available on the Internet, such as credit history reports and evictions records. An advanced technology screening tool, such as Corra Group Tenant Screening service (www.corragroup.com) will help landlords satisfy their new city ordinances as well as protect them from problem tenants.
It’s a Renters Market
The winter is usually a great time to find an apartment in Los Angeles, especially in the beach cities, where the cold Pacific Ocean wind keeps prospective volleyball players and bikinis at bay. According to Fox News, the housing slump has also created a renters market saturated with additional rental housing options for prospective tenants. The reason is because many homeowners can’t sell their houses or condos right now.
“They’re pulled their condos off the markets and they put them in the rental pool, so now our rental pool is now saturated too”
Act fast to take advantage of this rare combined effect of winter and housing slump and pick up that apartment you’ve always wanted. There are attractive rental rates available as well as incentives to move; sometimes 1month or 2 months free.
If you are looking to live a complex, duplex, or any sort of apartment living in close proximity to other tenants, make sure your landlord screens every tenant. This usually includes a credit history report, income verification, and employment verification, but should also include a criminal history search. You can learn a lot about your landlords’ property management style by how they treat you during the lease signing period.
More landlord tips including tenant screening
Increasingly, property managers and landlords are including tenant screening as a sound business step in their overall property management business. In these tough economic times, their have been a lot of tips for landlords, and they all seem to include some form of tenant screening. The most recent is from National Association of Independent Landlords, which encourages landlords to continue with their safe and effective business practices despite the sour economy. While it may seem expedient to hastily rent to the first availalbe tenant, they point out that “An empty apartment is less expensive than a tenant who cannot pay and will not move.”
Tenant Screening
The association recommends both running credit history reports, criminal records searches, eviction records searches, and even verify the tenants employment and residential history. These type of searches are comprehensive tenant screening will help you avoid most problem tenants, and also avoid any negligence lawsuits should something violent happen on your premises. While criminal record searches are available in many ways, we recommend you confirm the tenants address history and check out the criminal history where they lived. Some nationwide criminal databases are more powerful in different areas, and lacking in some. Speak with your tenant screening company about the where the database searches are good, and where you may need to run a county criminal search at the court. The county criminal search takes more time, but will pull directly from the court records.
Shooting at Property exposes flawed tenant screening practice
The Las-Cruces Sun News had an interesting article about a shooting death of a man at a trailer park, who was previously unknown to be a tenant there.
“We did a full background check,” she said. “He had just gotten out of prison. That’s probably why (his girlfriend) kept it under wraps, because otherwise we probably wouldn’t have rented to him.” “We didn’t give him authority to live there,” Albert Rodriguez said.
He had apparently moved in with his girlfriend a few weeks before, unknown to the property management. The girlfriend had rented the apartment and apparently passed the tenant screening; he had just gotten out of prison and would have been disqualified according to their tenant screening policy. After several complaints of loud music, the male was shoot to death in the trailer.
Property Managers are struggling with this all too frequent problem of shacking up with the significant other, especially if presents a danger to the residential community. How can you monitor your tenants effectively to be aware of this potentially dangerous changes? You could institute a policy regarding formal notification anyone staying over longer than say three days, but would any tenant effective follow the procedure. Could you institute incentives and disincentives for not reporting? How has time to monitor this behavior? It could be case of Monday Morning Quarterbacking. The trouble is for these property managers, they might be faced with a laced from other tenants for some perceived negligence. Hopefully the property managers will come up with a successful and practice solution to this now know hole in the tenant screening process.
tenant screening
background checks
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