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.

tenant screening
landlord tips
problem tenants