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
problem tenants
property management