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What’s The Best Way To Screen Tenants?

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Is There A Best Way To Screen Tenants?

Best way to screen tenantsMany first time visitors here are looking for the best way to screen tenants. The problem is, there is no single best way.

It really requires a multitude of strategies to ensure you’re screening as well as possible.

There is no single question you can ask, a certain number they need to have for a credit score or a the ultimate reference. It’s a combination of all of these plus a bit of your gut.

The real challenge that comes with this is that it’s also a matter of consistency.

If you have a multitude of requirements and a broad range of questions, hoops and steps that take you from a vacant property to a fully rented property it becomes incredibly important to create a process.

A process you can repeat to ensure you’re using the best way to screen tenants possible rather than a haphazard approach where you could miss steps.

How I Can Help You Screen Tenants

Fortunately I can help a little in that department, or a lot depending on your needs.

best ways to screen tenantsAt the very least I’d suggest you grab my list of 7 interview questions you need to ask prospective tenants. That will help you a little by providing several basic questions that you can consistently ask tenants during the phone interview stage of your vacancy.

By asking these questions before you even show your vacant unit you’ll save yourself an excessive amount of potentially wasted time by weeding out tenants who will never qualify for your property. Or who are simply testing the waters and aren’t even serious.

On top of that by creating a systematic process that you repeat over and over as a best way to screen tenants for your landlord business, you’ll be able to protect yourself from potential discrimination complaints.

Would You Like A System For Screening Tenants?

Of course the 7 Questions are just the beginning. They make up just one of the 7 steps required to properly screen a tenant.

These steps include

  1. screening with a good rental advertisement
  2. screening with an initial phone interview (using the 7 questions)
  3. screening with an in person interview at the property
  4. using a solid application form
  5. calling of work references
  6. calling of landlord references
  7. and finally a credit/criminal check

Then capping all of this off with how you feel about the tenant. After all if you’re in the business of creating good solid homes for tenants long term you do want to rent to someone you like don’t you?

I feel using these steps are the best way to screen tenants and to screen them consistently so that you get the best possible people for your property.

You’re more than welcome to build your own system using this set of steps and off of my original 7 questions.

What If I Built You The System?

Now many astute landlords will look at that information and realize it could take many many hours to create their own system. And it would be a lot of work.

Wouldn’t it be far easier to have it already done for me? In a format where I could download the steps, maybe learn the best way to write my ads so they can do soem screening for me?

Maybe even providing additional best practices and questions to ask references and former landlords?

How about if it also showed you where and how to get credit checks and criminal checks and then even told you how to read them?

How much time would that save you and how much easier would it make your life?

Well tada, I’ve done this for you!

It’s part of my How To Screen Tenants Like An Educated Landlord Course and I feel the information it contains should be mandatory for landlords to know.

It’s based on the actual systems and processes I’ve used over my career as a successful landlord and includes the best way to screen tenants that I know of.

The art of screening tenants is one of the important skills a landlord can possibly have. Choosing the wrong tenant can range from being a minor headache to costing you months of lost rent and excessive legal fees in order to evict a bad tenant.

With the average eviction costing a landlord over $3,000 in lost rent, lost time and vacancies this $47 investment saves you money the first time you use it.

How To Purchase The Educated Landlord Screening Course

If you’re interested in the course so you too can avoid choosing the wrong tenants or simply tenants who will be a poor fit for your property you can purchase this online training through the following link.

How To Screen Tenants Like an Educated Landlord

If you’re still not convinced you need this course, let me ask you a few questions.

What would learning how to write an ad that fills your property faster saving you extended vacancies be worth to you? With average rents around $1,000 one month of additional vacancy costs you at least $1,000 not including any utilities you cover out of pocket along with other costs. That’s why I include ad writing as part 1 of the course.

How much does your time cost if you go to show your vacant unit to someone who will never take it? With an average showing taking 30 minutes to show the property plus driving time every “wasted showing” costs you an hour of time. What’s your hour worth? What if this happens three or four times or even more? That’s why lesson two goes into detail about the 7 Questions and how you can use them to avoid showing the property to time wasters saving you multiple hours of your precious time.

Do you know the most common scam tenants use to get good references handed out? I do, which is why in lesson four I explain what to do to avoid those scams, how to verify their information and why their current landlord may be the worst reference possible! Knowing this can help you avoid soem of the worst possible tenants, the professional tenants who use their knowledge of the systems and laws to get into your property for months at a time without having to pay any rent.

What do you do if you can’t find a qualified tenant? The wrong answer is to settle and the second wrong answer is to tell the applicants who didn’t qualify that they aren’t qualified! In section five I break down what to do if you don’t find qualified tenants and how to let the unsuccessful applicants down easy and so they don’t come after you for discrimination charges which is extremely important!

Finally, do you know where to get credit or criminal checks done and how to read them? Many landlords don’t know where to start with this and then even if they do they have no idea how to read or understand the reports once they get them. I explain a couple places to get credit checks done along with explaining what to look for and how to read them.

The best way to screen tenants - the Educated Landlord Screening Course

If you’d like to learn all the right steps to screen tenants along with what to watch out for to avoid the wrong tenants you’ll want to sign up today and get educated.

Again here’s that link, How To Screen Tenants Like an Educated Landlord

Remember, it’s all online with multiple downloads you even if you’re fully rented right now you can sign up, take the course at your own pace and be ready and primed for your next vacancy. You’ll even have all the skills to pre-write your ad for your next vacancy!

 

Know other landlords who have recently had problem tenants? Forward this article to them so they can avoid future problems!

Landlord Lessons

I’m Just Your Typical Landlord Hypocrite

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This is probably where I need to say, do what the landlord says, not what he does!

I have to confess, I’m breaking my own rules. Now I guess in the big picture that’s not a huge issue, but when it comes to a tenant owing me a ton of money and me suddenly finding myself sucked into the Eviction Spiral, it gets a bit serious.

After all, I’m supposed to be the expert, yet I’m making the same mistake I tell you not too and I guess I better tell the entire tale. So let me take you down the garden path….

Landlord story, down the garden path with a tenant

 

This actually dates all the way back to December with one of my weekly rental tenants. He’s a very clean neat individual, but a) he doesn’t speak very much english and b) he owes me money.

As we zip back a few months to the beginning of December as typically happens to many of my rooming house tenants they vacate around mid month and head back to where their families are located. It’s typical as many of the construction projects close down early before Christmas and many of the workers get to enjoy a two or three week break and trades folks are who I cater too.

So this is something I tend to see every year, then in January they start coming back, rooms fill up and it’s business as usual. Now my nice clean non-english speaking fellow named Michel had no one to go home to. No family around, nothing, so he intended to stay at my property over the break. the only issue being, he had no income coming in to pay for the room. (This is where the hypocrite part comes into play!)

As I weigh my options I have a few things to consider a) he’s a good guy, b) he’s been good about paying in his past history and c) I have a bunch of vacancies anyway and if I kick him out or he leaves I still won’t be collecting rent for that room and I don’t know what the next guy will be like and how many weeks before there could be a next guy.

So I did the easy thing, I let him stay.

Fast Forward to January

calendarI just happen to live in an oil based economy region so as January rolls around many of the projects have moved to a hold status due to the uncertainty of oil prices and the viability of some of these projects going forward if oil stays low.

Instead of starting work at the beginning of January, it turns into mid January, then late January and finally the beginning of February before he finally lands a job. the good news is, he gets paid a lot per hour, so it own’t take too long to get caught up. (Now I don’t want you to read anything into this, but I’m talking about getting caught up in February and here it is March when I’m writing this…)

Anyway, according to my rules, I should have cut bait and recast already. instead I go with my gut and give him more time. This is the part where YOU need to do what I say and not what I’m currently doing with this guy.

Now Fast Forward to Late February

Now we’re in the last week of February and I get a text update from him (he uses French to English conversion to send me texts, sometimes it is very very confusing). This set of texts though is quite clear. He will have $2,000 for me on Saturday the 28th (yes, I let a weekly tenant rack up an outstanding balance of over $2,000, please find me a wall to bang my head on).

As you can imagine I’m pretty upbeat when I go to meet him Saturday, at least at first.

You see, he lost his bank card and couldn’t withdraw the money.

Is it time to panic yet?

Of course he can’t tell me this due to the lack of conversational English between us, but he has notes that someone obviously wrote out for him in English. So now I’m stuck in a tight spot. It’s the Eviction Spiral I referred to originally.

If I kick him out, I take a huge loss, so I have to take a stand.

His notes tell me he will go to the bank after work Monday get the cash and get a new card and will have the money for me Tuesday night. Experience tells me this is the perfect getaway for him.

If he has $2,000 that is enough for him to get into a new rental place, with the 1st being the next day, it’s an optimum time for him to skip out.

But I follow the hypocritical emotional road and lay down the line, Either I get paid Tuesday or he GETS OUT!!

Even in our lack of a mutual language I am quite sure I got my point across, now I play the waiting game.

My question for you, what would you have done?  Let me know your thoughts in the comments below and I’ll add an update Wednesday about what happened!

Update Friday

Just to make this worse, I’ve extended to tomorrow. The tenant paid $200 to buy a few more days, but tomorrow is the cutoff. I meant to update Wednesday, but it’s been one of those weeks that will likely be extending out for the entire month!

Poof, It’s Magic!

Yes, I’ve had another tenant disappear…

I was at the property Monday to get some work and cleaning done there (I rented a steam cleaner for the day, so I was bouncing from property to property to get the most bang for my rental dollar) and my tenant’s room was wide open, all his items were gone, the room was quite clean, his keys were on the dresser and he was gone.

Bottom line, I’m out a bunch of money, my faith in humanity is eaten away a bit more and in the end I can still sleep at night. I tried to help, deep down I knew it probably wasn’t going to work out for me, but as part of my nature I really do want to help people (hence this site!), just along the way I may have to take a little damage.

The hypocritical lesson to pass along is if things are really tight, you can’t take this chance. You need to clamp down immediately. I could probably rationalize some of the loss as I would have had a vacant room for multiple weeks anyway, but it’s still a loss. If you have more losses than wins, you eventually lose and in Real Estate, you lose big when you lose.

 

Interview With a Landlord

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Can you believe it’s fall already? Time has absolutely flown by and I apologize for the extended layoff with videos and posts. I think putting that Screening Course together in August threw me off further than I thought.

On the positive side, I have more information started that I want to get out to everyone and it starts with an interview I did last week with a landlord I’ve been mentoring for the last four years. I’d known Tim before he started in the landlord business and since he knew what I did, he reached out to find out more about being a Real Estate investor.

I think I gave him enough to get started as it wasn’t too much longer before he picked up his first rental property and now he’s got several in his portfolio and isn’t done yet. With an eye for analyzing potential properties he’s done well in picking some properties with great potential, but he’s also had some hiccups along the way.

In this 8 minute interview Tim sits down with me and goes over some of what he has discovered along the way and shares a bit of his story, I hope you enjoy it.

If you did enjoy this and feel your story would be interesting and informative to others I’d love to set up an interview with you. Since our readers are scattered all over the country I can do interviews via Skype if that works or I can even set up an online meeting to record our conversation.

To get started, email me at info@TheEducatedLandlord.com and let’s help make you famous!

 

Bill

Landlord Video Tips – Set Your Rents Higher to Avoid Headaches

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Tired of getting stuck with problem tenants? Want to make sure you have more quality applicants for your vacant rental rather than trying to weed through quantity?

In today’s video tip I explain a tip that has helped us get better quality tenants who not only take better care of our properties for us, but also tend to stay longer. Two qualities than can definitely make your life as a landlord easier.

 

As always, i love to hear any feedback ou may have, so leave a comment and don’t forget to share these tips with other landlords you may know. And if you have questions, send them in and I’ll see if I can answer them in a video for you!