More communities are providing forums to help landlords and property owners understand their rights and help them engage effectively with their tenants.  Champlin Minnesota is the newest community to encourage this behavior, which a forum that occurred on May 14th, the second annual landlord forum. 

In addition to discussing low interest loans for property repair, using the Internet to link potential tenants and landlords, they also discussed the important of Tenant Screening.  Large multi-occupancy housing complexes are their own communities and landlords are advised to effectively screen all tenants to protect their communities and their local housing reputation.  All it takes is one bad seed to destroy a neighborhood. Landlords can avoid most negligence lawsuits by conducting a tenant screening program that including credit history report, eviction records, criminal records search, as well as employment verification. 

Predicting future tenant behavior

While you cannot foretell the future, awareness of previous eviction records and horrible credit history are a red flag and shows you how your prospective tenant dealt with financial responsibility in the past.   Unless they have newly discovered financial responsibility and are seeking to turn their lives around, what evidence do you have that they will pay rent ever month and not damage the apartment?

background checks
tenant screening
eviction records

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

It wasn’t a good day to be a tenant or a landlord in Seoul, Korea.  A jobless man set fire to his apartment on the third floor of a five story studio apartment building.  The blaze damaged the building, injured seven people people and killed four.  The angry tenant apparently attacked fleeing tenants as they left the building.  100 residents fled the building and 11 were hospitalized.

As economic tensions mount, be aware of potential changes in your tenants behavior.  While your tenant and building security is top notch, and it is beyond the scope to know of a tenant’s potential for violence unless a documented violent behavior in the past has occurred.  If your tenant is arrested, if there is a police report or police called the building, make sure your security personnel write their own report documenting what happened.   You do not want to be held liable if what occurs could be construed as foreseeable.  Also, arguably, even if you could win the lawsuit, you don’t want to spend money and time on it.

Always conduct proper tenant screening to adopt a screening policy that include criminal records searches.   Better to be safe than sorry; and make sure that your tenant screening policy is consistent.

tenant screening
property management
criminal records

Make sure you check out your potential tenant’s criminal history before you offer them the apartment or your home.  An instant criminal database search is a fast way to protect yourself and other tenants  by finding out your renter’s criminal history.   You can go further and conduct hand pulled criminal record searches in the county courthouses where your renter has lived, but these searches can take two or three business days depending on the courthouse.  Some counties take even longer. 

When screening your tenants make sure “the investigation does not exceed the limits set by state and federal law.”  The Los Angeles Times recently listed some instruction for California landlords. 

Since a background check is considered to be a “consumer credit report,” it is governed by California Civil Code Section 1785.13. This statute prohibits screening agencies from using arrest records, indictments or misdemeanor complaints that did not result in convictions. This statute also prohibits the use of convictions that occurred more than seven years before the check.

Under the state and federal fair housing laws, the use of criminal screening, like any other type of screening, must be applied evenly, across-the-board rather than selectively based on certain profiles or stereotypes. 
 
 

 Los Angeles Times

county criminal records

background checks