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.

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

As the recession moves from Wall Street to Main Street, local cities are forced to deal with the affects, with shrinking tax revenue.   We were all hopefull during the housing boom that blighted parts of town would be regentrified, and the blight would be replaced by a white picket fence and an interest only mortage.  

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.

tenant screening
landlord associations