The screening process while placing a tenant in your rental property needs to be fair and consistent, and it also needs to be thorough and investigative. Today, we’re sharing the process we use at Walters & Company when we’re handling applications and screening tenants.
We like to focus on 3 main things:
- Rental history
- Income
- Credit and criminal background checks
Rental History and Denver Tenants
An excellent tenant will pay rent on time, take care of your investment property, and follow the specific terms of your lease agreement. When we’re searching for your perfect tenant, we always require that the applicant provide us with at least three years of verifiable rental history.
We contact previous landlords to ensure and verify rental rates, rental terms, and the condition of the property. Understanding the experience previous landlords and property managers have had with a tenant can give us a good idea about how that tenant will perform while in one of our properties.
Sometimes, we’ll get applications from prospective tenants who don’t have any kind of verifiable rental history. They may have been homeowners. In this case, we’ll verify timely mortgage payments through their credit and background check.
Income and Employment Standards
When we’re verifying income, we like to see paystubs from at least the last two months of employment. If there aren’t any paystubs, we’ll ask for some proof of income. Self-employed applicants can provide tax documents or bank statements. After we’ve verified that the applicant earns enough to pay the rent every month, we’ll contact employers to ensure all the information provided on the application is accurate. We’re also looking for a professional reference. If we find out that any information was falsified on the application during processing, that application is immediately denied.
Credit & Background Checks
The final step of our screening process is to run credit and background checks on the applicants. We use our National Credit Bureau and National and State Database. While we don’t expect to find perfect credit scores, we are looking for any kind of delinquent major accounts and outstanding balances. We do ensure that there are no other items that would disqualify the individual from leasing the property. Things on the credit report that would disqualify an applicant might be outstanding debts owed to former landlords or prior evictions.
Once we complete the screening process and an applicant has been approved, we then submit all the information to the owner for final approval. We feel that this keeps you in the loop and keeps you in the driver’s seat while we are renting out your property. Our goal is to paint as much of the whole picture as possible to ensure that your property is in good hands.
The tenant screening process is important, and your rental experience will largely be influenced by the type of tenant you place. If you have any questions about screening tenants or anything pertaining to Denver property management, please contact us at Walters & Company Property Management.