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.

Keep in my mind that screening a tenant screening report requires some analysis and evaluation of risk.   The paper version of someone might not match who they are: a DUI from ten years ago, doesn’t mean they are currently an alcoholic.  Look at the totality of the person, including conducting an employment verification and reference checks.

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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?

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Backsliding into chaos
Now, as new housing projects falter and the money dries up, more areas are backsliding into blight and neglect.  Municipalities are concerned about rising crime, particularly crimes of desperation including muggings, burglary, etc.  More cities are focused on the need for maintaining or improving the quality of their large multi-comples housing.   Carroll County Landlords Association is hosting a conference on tenant screening on April 2th, to help landlords learn about what services are all available to them.  

During this hard economic times, it’s reviewing your tenant screening policy.  Is it enough to jsut review your tenant’s credit report?   Should you verify their employment using a qualified employment verifying expert?  The paystub you see might just be the last one they got.

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It will be interesting how the Cook County Sheriff’s Department proceeds with their background check program.  They say “any sworn officer with a felony conviction can’t keep that post”  Hopefully the Chicago police always conducting background checks on all officer candidates.  It seems unlikely that a currently employed sworn officer could be convicted of a felony without their employer becoming aware of it.  Not unless they took a leave of absence and went to California.  The implication here is that the Sheriff’s Department probably didn’t conduct a comprehensive background check of all officer candidates, or the focus is on the civilian employees of the Department. 

The sheriff’ s spokesman stated, “As for civilian employees, we’d look at it on a case-by-case basis.”

An employer should establish a firm screening policy for background checks to avoid any allegations of favoritism or discrimination.  Also, for the civilian employees it seems the department must adhere to the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which would indicate they must ignore some crimes occurring more than seven years ago.

Hopefully the Chicago Police and the  Cook County Sheriff’s Department are able to weed out any potential problems before it makes the papers.

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In response to residents’ complaints, the city will forward (the owner) reports of serious incidents so he can follow through with the tenants, including evicting them if necessary. 

More than ever we are seeing communities starting to crack down on apartment complexes that seem to have a large amount of police responses.   While the efforts of the community to reduce crime are noble, it seems possible that some apartment complex owners could be scapegoated based on one or two problem tenants.  The lesson here is to avoid becoming the scapegoat bad apartment owner no matter what the actual facts are. 

Don’t want until the city council calls to you respond to complaints.  Make moves now to shore up your public relations by implementing and enforcing an effective tenant screening program that not only includes credit history checks but also a criminal history search and employment verification.  Make your efforts visible and clear to the surrounding community.  If necessary, hire security guards or install cameras to monitor activity in potential problem areas, like the parking lot, stairwells, and anywhere tenants will likely loiter.  Publicize your efforts and your community public relations will improve.  You might even be rewarded for your efforts to clean up the community.   

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“We think better tenant screening … should lead to less calls for police service, better tenant management and safer neighborhoods,” said Hanson, looking over the file that contained police data on problem properties spanning five years.

The ordinance will possibly be implemented later this winter.  Property owners and rental managers should be aware that tenant screening tools are readily available on the Internet, such as credit history reports and evictions records.  An advanced technology screening tool, such as Corra Group Tenant Screening service (www.corragroup.com) will help landlords satisfy their new city ordinances as well as protect them from problem tenants.

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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.

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“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.

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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.

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