Application and background check is one the most important things in real estate and yet it tends to be one the most overlooked (amazingly, many landlords, even apartment complexes, don’t even really do background checks, but I confess to doing it poorly at the start too). In today's age of technology/Google our tools for weeding out bad tenants are better than could have been imagined not too many years ago, though. It can save you a lot of heartache if you can avoid sure-fire deadbeats, and they are out there looking to rent from you.
Something you should understand is that in any town, even a small town, there is a group of tenants who simply move from property to property constantly (owing all kinds of back rent) and they often are among the first to respond to your ad. They are constantly watching the ads in the paper looking for “fresh meat” since they have been written off at a number of places already, so they’re looking for you if you're the new landlord on the block. You protect yourself from these leap frog and other types of bad tenants primarily with your background check.
A mistake a lot of landlords make is requiring only one application, even though more than one person is going to live in a rental unit. The scam we’ve seen repeatedly is that there are a lot of guys out there who will find themselves a girlfriend who has a clean record and have her apply for the rental. If you were to check on the guy, he often has a rap sheet that's pretty significant. So we learned to insist that every adult who wants to live in the apartment must fill out a separate lease application of their own and the lease itself will contain language that prohibits people from moving in without your approval after you’ve rented it. If you don't do this you will get taken advantage of. Over and over we’ve had situations where a boyfriend or girlfriend moved in “under the radar”, and had it turn out to be a big problem. If we suspect someone is living in the unit who shouldn’t, we start snooping. Ask the neighbors what’s going on, see what cars are staying overnight, etc. When you find this going on, insist on an application from the new resident (unless you already have decided you don’t want them), and run it just like any other. You have to build penalties into the lease for keeping unauthorized roomies. If they don’t pass your application, you boot them.
Before confirming employment and the other details of the lease there are few things you do online. If you hit a big negative in these simple things, you don’t have to waste time on the rest. The first thing that you do after getting an application is to Google them. Google is an amazing tool that is a quick and easy place to start, though it can’t nearly do everything. Search on the applicant’s name (and variations like nicknames) and the address that they last lived in to see what turns up; search through the news feature of Google as well as the web search. In most cases now, local city newspapers are searchable. In many places arrest records and sometimes even court convictions are recorded online in the paper. You have to do this search separate from Google (these databases typically exist outside of what Google can access), but it too can turn up a wealth of information. The next thing you do is make sure that they are not a registered sex offender. If you have a small apartment building you can see the situation there deteriorate quickly if you start letting sex offenders live there. Sex offender is an automatic “no” for us on applications. Every state has a website where you can search for sex offenders. If you Google the state name along with “sex offender registry” it should turn up.
Next we get into the nitty-gritty of finding those “leap-frog” tenants before you let them land on you.
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