Landlords would undoubtedly do tenant screening process before they make an agreement with the tenants to use the property. In fact, this screening process is highly crucial. Through the process, you can have the potential and ideal tenants or you can have nightmare tenants.
There are good reasons why you should do the screening, and how you can do the task effectively. Read on to find out the benefits of the screening process.
Why You Should Do It?
Tenant screening is basically an imperative part of the property leasing process. Unfortunately, it’s often overlooked by landlords. A thorough and complete process would ensure that you have potential tenants that aren’t only suitable for the property, but also reliable.
If you don’t go through this process properly, you have the biggest risk of interacting with poor quality tenants that will give you nothing but trouble in the future. Do you really want to allow such people to live in your property? If you want to avoid such a problem, then you should perform the screening correctly.
The Benefits of Doing the Screening
There are some basic benefits of doing the screening:
- You can avoid any late rent payments. You really don’t want to chase them for late rents because it’s stressful and time consuming. Rent issues typically lead to evictions, which can cost you money and time. However, if you perform a strict screening process, you can avoid all of these issues. When you do the screening, you can look of their financial situation and basically their track records to find out their reliability related to paying the rents. When you check on their credit score, monthly income, or the tenant’s guarantor, you can see the quality of the tenant.
- You can rest assured your property stays in good condition. Properties are subject to tear and wear, but rental properties are exposed to bigger risks because you really don’t know what kind of tenants you have. If you don’t want to have unwelcome surprise by the end of the tenancy, you can sort only to have respectful and trusted tenants. These kinds of tenants will take care of your property, treating it as if it were theirs.
- You want to protect your own reputation. You definitely don’t want to be known as the landlord that allows the troublemaker tenants. Not only it will hurt your reputation, but it affects the surrounding neighborhood too. Let’s not forget that you are running a business, and there is a certain reputation that you need to live up to. Don’t risk it by neglecting the screening process.
How to Do It?
There are three options when it comes to screening your tenants. First, you can do everything by yourself – manually. It means that you can find out everything about your tenants by performing credit score check, background check, and other kinds of checks.
Second, you can use an app to make the process easier. With the app, you simply provide the information that you know and then the app would do the heavy work for you. Instead of doing separate searching, you only need to do one process and you will get the result right away.
The third way would be hiring the property management service. This kind of service provider will deal with the details of your property management, including rent collection, tenant screening, and others. In fact, when you hire such a service, you won’t have to bother doing the management task. Simply leave the service provider to do their work and you only need to wait for the results.
The Next Step?
Even after you have screened your tenants (and you have found the ideal tenants), you still need to be extra careful about everything. Make sure that you lay out the details and the regulations in the lease agreement.
It may be subjected for discussion, but everything should be known (and agreed) by both tenants and you as the landlord. Once the lease agreement is signed (by both parties), it has legal power that binds landlords and tenants.
In the end, never underestimate the screening process if you want to have drama-free life as a landlord. Now that you know the exact deal of tenant screening and its importance, you should know what to do next.
