We are often asked the question about what information should prospective tenants provide the landlord in a rental application before ordering a tenant screening report. This is very important because you want to gain as much information from your rental applicant as possible because with this information you will want to conduct an investigation into their background history by ordering a tenant screening report. The information that your prospective tenant offers you will play a very important role in helping you decide if you are dealing with an honest and trustworthy person who is capable of paying their bills.
The most important items you want to get is a valid social security number, date of birth, and all of their past addresses over at least the past 5 years including a current or most recent address. Additionally, you want to ask for banking and credit references and you will want to know if they have any open collection accounts, court judgments or criminal history. You want to learn about employment history as well as at least 3 personal references. Certainly, a good rental application will ask all of the above questions and more. Once you have had your prospective tenant complete your application and provide you with this information, you are now ready to order a tenant screening report.
The mission is to weed out any applicant that you determine to have a higher than average propensity to defraud you, abuse your property or engage in future criminal behavior. In order to do this, you will need to have independent verification for this person's background history. There are a number of ways you can accomplish this but none more thorough or comprehensive than to obtain a tenant screening report from a professional background reporting agency who can access nationwide databases. It is technically possible to do this on your own, but to generate a report that a professional service can provide you is well worth the very small investment. It could potentially take you months of research without the aid of a professional to gather all of the information you are looking for amongst literally thousands of different sources of data nationwide.
The problem is that most landlords do not order tenant screening reports and this is the number one reason why the court system is overflowing with too many landlord/tenant disputes. It is absolutely foolish not to order a tenant screening report on every single person that you are considering as an occupant of your valuable property. By conducting a good tenant screening and working with a reputable tenant screening service, you can improve your odds of success in finding good tenants tremendously.
Shannon Ellsworth works in the commercial property division of Tenant Screening Report, a company that specializes in skip tracing and professional background investigations utilizing extensive resources that include nationwide databases to retrieve relevant history on any person or business located within the United States.
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