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.
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More Tenants From Hell
Apartment Trashed by Tenant
Sometimes, regardless of how responsive you are, you may have a tenant who is unwilling to recognize the logical and legal limitations of your role as landlord. What they decided to do about it is anyone’s guess; hopefully you leases to a decent and honest person. Did you? Did you conduct a background check to verify their employment, income, and or criminal history?
Sometime tenants will just trash your place. Like this guy in England from a Times UK article.
The landlord spents months trying to evict a tenant, and when he finally did, he found the place was vandalized to the tune of £20,000. That’s a big number to absorb when you are attempting to earn some passive income of your income property investments.
When tenants bear the cost of Tenant Screening
When screening tenants for your apartment building or condominium, make sure you are in compliance with federal, state and local ordinances. When running a credit report on a potential tenant, you must follow the Federal Fair Credit Reporting Act. Make sure you obtain a signed disclosure and release form from the potential tenant before running the credit report. Depending on your location, if the potential tenant is paying the screening fee, make sure you are in compliance with local regulations regarding price and stay transparent by given them an itemized receipt for the screening fee transactions. Some locations have a maximum amount you can charge a tenant, so check locally and assure you are in compliance.
What to do before you apply for an Apartment
For tenants, we recommend checking your credit report you apply for an apartment. If there are any discrepancies on your record, clear those up as fast as you can. You are able to dispute charges on your credit report if you believe they are incorrect. You can also attach a personal statement to you credit report explaining anything you believe requires a good explanation. Be aware of what is on your credit report, including bankruptcies, tax liens, civil judgments, which are public records, and also any unpaid bills. Don’t be caught by surprise while you are applying for the apartment of your dreams, or worse, be in a desperate situation and need an apartment, today. Clean up your credit situation and be prepared to explain any discrepancies to the management company. Make your bring in the management company or landlord information from your previous locations, and make sure they will be good references for your past rental history. Following these steps will help you obtain that apartment.
Checking Tenant Credit Reports in the Foreclosure era
In these times of recession, you’re bound to see poor credit scores and derogatory credit information on your potential tenant’s credit reports. Many tenants are property owners who are somewhere in the mess of foreclosure or attempting a short sale. They can be desperate to find housing and that’s why they are applying to rent your property. One thing to be aware of are tenants who claim their poor credit score is due to their foreclosure strategy. In order to qualify for a loan modification they actively refuse to pay their mortgage and thus their score suffers. They claim they really are sound financially but are strategy trying to get off mortgage. If this is true, consider the implications. No matter how unfair the mortgage situation might have been for them, the fact is they are refusing to pay a financial obligation that they agreed to. They read the loan docs, (or they were supposed to) and a notary notarized their signature. Even if you agree that their situation was unfair, do you agree with their payment strategy? Now consider if they have elected not to pay a large bank with the full weight of a huge financial institution behind them, why would they pay you, a property management company, or a single property owner? Proceed with caution.
Find out if your new tenant is litigious
While many property managers run tenant credit checks on prospective tenants, they are many other background check searches that provide additional insight into your tenant’s background. First off, a credit history report is a valuable tool for evaluate your tenant’s past fiduciary responsibility. You will see a FICO score, giving an overall portrait of your tenant’s creditworthiness, as well as any public records such as bankruptcies, tax liens, and civil judgments, and any open trade-lines and any charge-offs. You can determine how much they are paying on monthly credit card bills as well as other long term loans such as auto loans, real estate, school loans, etc. Calculate how much they are paying on a monthly basis, then compare to the pay stub they provided to you. Does it add up? If it doesn’t, proceed with caution.
Employment Verification
If you are concerned about the pay stub’s validity, verify your candidate’s employment status. You can contact the employer directly, or use a third party background verification service such as Corra Group, to contact the employer and verify job title, current job standing (is the tenant laid off, and they handed you an old pay stub?) as well as salary information. Employers are increasingly not releasing compensation information, but verifying the current employment status should be good enough for your purposes.
County Civil Lawsuit Searches
You might find it a good idea to check for County Civil Lawsuit Searches in the areas where your candidate has resided. Check the Credit History Report header which will show your tenants previous addresses. Check the courthouses in the area where they have lived, the Civil Higher and lower courts. You’re looking to see if your candidate has been listed as a Plaintiff in any civil matters. That means the tenant has filed a case. If they are listed as a plaintiff in several cases, proceed with caution. You may be the next defendant. If the tenant is listed as defendant, check out court records and find out why the subject is a defendant. Was it another apartment management company? It’s good to know what you are dealing with before the property is rented.
Bad Tenants Can Damage Your Property
Thought we’d share with you some video that a landlord took of the inside of apartment, showing apparent damage caused by a tenant. Interesting discussion from various landlords, including the idea that you should inspect your property every six months to keep tabs on the condition of your asset. Keep in mind that tenants who get evicted don’t have much of an interest in cleaning up the property before they leave. We recommend you screen your potential tenants for previous eviction records before you allow them to move in. While you cannot predict what will happen once they move in, at least you will know if they have a history of evictions.
It’s also important to contact their previous landlords and see what additional information can be gleaned. Hopefully you will find a good tenant. Good luck!
Keeping Sex Offenders out of your Rental Unit
Is a sex offender living in one of your units? How do you know? You may be checking your tenants credit score and possible eviction history, but you should consider conducting criminal background checks as well. By ordering even an Instant Nationwide Criminal Database search you can verify whether your prospective tenant is a registered sex offender. In addition, criminal databases from around the country we also include access to 50 states sex offender registries.
You can pass the cost of the criminal background check to the tenant, as part of the application process, including the credit report.
What happens if you do hire a sex offender or a criminal and something bad happens in your building or area? According to an article in Habitat Magazine, if a landlord or Co-Op could have forseen that something bad happening by implementing a background screening system for all tenants, then they might be seen as negligent. “The failure to check — in certain instances — may be negligent.”
Corra Group inteviewd by Canalplus about Background Checks
Corra Group founders were recently interviewed by French News Cable channel CanalPlus, regarding background checks in the Film and Television industry, specifically about Ryan Jenkins and running background checks on Reality Television industry contestants. The interview is overdubbed in French, but you can hear what’s going on underneath.
Page Readers talks with Gordon Basichis, author of “The Guys Who Spied for China”
Gordon Basichis, Co-Founder of Corra Group, just wrote a new book called “The Guys Who Spied for China”, about the interesting world of international espionage.
Click here to learn more about this interview
About the Author:
Basichis is also co-founder of Corra, which as the Corra Group specializes
in pre-employment and corporate research and investigation. In addition to his books, Basichis has written Breach of Trust/Crash, a feature film, and has co-written several television series pilots. He co-created and served as Executive Producer on the forthcoming Showtime mini-series Land of Dreams. He was the co-producer of an ABC Television Network series pilot, and the
producer-director of Jerry, One Man’s Triumph, a video documentary about the nation’s first jailhouse lawyer. He has worked as an investigative
journalist and researcher, and in advertising, marketing and public
relations.
Tenant Screening helps prevent neighborhood blight in recession
According to a recent article on Fox, property owners in Memphis, Tennessee are watching their neighborhoods turn to blight as the properties around them fall into disrepair, become abandoned with overgrown lawns and attract squatters and criminal activity. Some property owners say that the property maintenance is the responsibility of the tenants. Dr. Phyllis Betts, the director of the “Center for Community Building and Neighborhood Action” suggested tenant screening as a solution to reducing neighborhood blight. Conducting background checks on your tenants will provide you with a portrait of your prospective tenants past behavior including criminal activity and financial responsibility. Running an eviction search can give you enough information to determine if you want to risk having a tenant in your property who has already failed to pay back a previous property owner.
The trouble in this recesssion is that even people with good credit are having a hard time paying their bills. A credit report is only as good as the moment it was taken. Insisting on proof of employment is a valuable way to make sure you tenant can at least pay next months rent. But what about four months from now? after your tenant has moved in. Are you noticing signs of problems? Have the checks been arriving later and later in the month? Are you charging late fees? Is your tenant dating their checks for later in the month? Are you feeling squeezed? It’s difficult to know the right thing to do. Always adhere to the local, state, and nationals laws about housing. It is worth maintaining a line of communication with your tenant. Maintain accurate and current contact information for your tenant. Should they decide to skip town without paying rent, contact information will assist with locating and collecting any judgments you obtain.
Bad Landlords Making the news
A recent article in HeraldNet discusses a rise in bad landlords in Everett. Due to the recession, landlords have had their work cut out for them. Cash strapped tenants are paying rent late or not at all, damaging property and skipping town. Landlords are finding it hard to maintain property safety and grounds keeping, clean water and perimeter security. In a landlords haste to rent a property they may quickly install a new tenant in an apartment without conducting even a basic tenant background check, which can easily be down with a credit report, a nationwide criminal database search, and an eviction records search. Additional research can include county criminal record searches in the county courthouses, as well as employment and income verification.
Landlords need to realize they will save money in the long run by investing in tenant background checks. A properly screened tenant is about as good a testament of future behavior is you can get. You can’t always predict if someone is going to lose your job and get divorced and lose their source of income, but at least you will know that up to that point their credit has not been affected. At least with a tenant like that, they will work with you to pay a rent. You can avoid the repeat offenders with a simple credit report.
