Being a Landlord and Using Effective Tenant Screening
Author: SimonMSkinner Total views: 25 Word Count: 391
I inherited an apartment building from a family member and found myself in a new position as a landlord. It is a great career, keeps me busy and makes me a very good income. However there are some pitfalls and I had to learn them the hard way, on the way!
You can't trust everybody, no matter how much you want to. As a landlord, you have to protect not only your property, but you have to protect yourself and your family. It's also just as important for you protect all the families that rent from you.
One sure way to try and protect all people and property is to run some screenings on people before you rent to them. There are several types of screenings that you can run, to help you decide if you want to rent to someone.
My personal choice is to run a tenant screening process as well as a criminal background and social security check. For all my screening processes I utiltize the services of MacDataAdvantage.com. They are a great online screening company that provide all of the screening tools and information that I need.
A tenant background check is definitely worth running before you sign a rental agreement with a new tenant. For instance I would not want a sex offender living next door to a family with young children, I wouldnt want someone wih a history of destroying property either.
Running a social security background check is also very useful. It would not be very clever of me to rent to someone who had a habit of moving out before their rent is due!
Let me give you an example of when running a simple background check or tenant screening has helped me avoid what could have been a bad situation. Here I had a young couple who wanted to rent one of the apartments in my building. They looked good, the application that they filled out looked good and I was sure I was going to be happy with them.
Then I run the screenings and all the warm fuzzies I had with those two went right out the window. Not only did they have a history of nonpayment of their rent, they had forfeited their security/cleaning deposit twice before for breaking things in the home and for leaving things very dirty.
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About the Author
Macdataadvantage.com is a leading online business providing employee screening and background checks. To learn more about employee background checks or criminal background checks then visit the site for more details on how to protect your business.
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