The best thing any landlord can do to protect themselves against renting to the wrong candidate is resident screening. By merely looking at an application, you have no idea if this person is going to be able to pay their rent or if they have a history of not paying their rent and other bills prior to this. Just to be sure, tenant background checks should always be run before putting ink to paper on a rental agreement.

When you run tenant background checks, you are going to get a snapshot of the perspective tenant. It will not tell everything that there is to know about the person, but it will give a pretty good idea of their financial status and their history and ability to be able to pay their rent. Without this information, you might as well let anyone that applies move in.

Something to also keep in mind is that just because their overall score is lower than you may want, it may not mean that they are a risk. For instance, say someone had a medical problem that forced them to file for bankruptcy a few years ago. Their credit score would probably be below the 700 mark, but if it is close, it would go a long way in showing that they have made great strides in recent years to get back on track.

If this is the case, you may have an ideal candidate to move in as long as they make enough money to cover the rent. Instead of focusing on what their overall credit score is, look and see how their credit is over the last couple of years. The renter credit check will show what cards, loans and utilities that they have outstanding and how they have been managing to pay them. If they are current and have been since the bankruptcy, you should have little worry that they will do anything but continue to pay their bills and increase their rating.