Are you planning on renting or leasing your property to a tenant? If yes, then it’s important to conduct tenant screenings to help ensure your property will be properly taken care of and you will be paid on time for rent. These screenings are a type of background check that help you determine whether applicants are at a higher risk for missing payments, damaging property, or being evicted.
Now that you know what a tenant screening is, let’s discuss why it is important for protecting your property.
As a landlord, it’s essential to know who will be renting your property. You have invested a lot of time, energy, and money into your property, so it’s important to not rent it to just anybody. Whether you are renting a house to an individual or apartments to multiple families, it’s better to be safe than sorry. Those online horror stories exist for a reason, which is to remind property owners to do their research before signing contracts with potential tenants. To ensure you properly screen tenants, it’s recommended that you hire experts to conduct tenant screenings for you.
Tenant screenings will:
- Keep your property and surrounding neighborhood safe with criminal background checks
- Safeguard your finances by choosing reliable tenants with good credit history
- Prevent you from renting to distrustful people
- Look for negative patterns in a tenant’s rental and employment history
- Verify that the person is who they say they are by checking identity, employment, and salary
As you can see, tenant screenings are a worthy investment that can help you avoid frustration, legal battles, and property damages to your investments. At PATRIOT Backgrounds and Investigations, we are experts in conducting tenant screenings, along with pre-employment screenings and much more. As former police officers with decades of experience, we are here to provide expert services to help protect and improve our local community.
We offer a wide range of options for our tenant screening process, which includes the following:
- Identification: We will verify a person’s identification, date of birth, and other details from public state and national records. This will help us determine if they are who they say they are. We will also check their documentation, such as passports, driver licenses, employment ID, voter ID, and more.
- Rental and Eviction History: By checking the person’s rental history, these results will help us determine how reliable and trustworthy they are as a renter. We will contact past landlords and property managers to ask about their reliability and any alarming patterns, such as being evicted or damaging property.
- Credit Report and Fraud Detection: To make sure tenants will consistently pay their rent on time, we will perform credit checks. This will help us determine if they have any red flags that could be an indicator of fraud.
- Employment and Income Verification: To ensure tenants can make their rental payments, we can contact current employers to verify their employment and income status.
- Criminal Record Search: To avoid renting your property to potentially dangerous individuals, we can search for criminal charges, which include sex offenses, traffic violations, drunk driving, misdemeanors, and solicitation. To take it a step further, we will assess how frequently these individuals have been criminally charged by searching through most wanted databases, local, state, or national records, courthouses, and police departments. With this information, we can determine if the applicant is a repeat offender, which is a red flag.
If you need your tenant screenings done quickly and accurately, then it is best to hire a private investigator to get the job done right. The last thing you want is to rent your property to an unreliable, possibly unstable person who will cost you thousands of dollars in damages and legal issues. Contact PATRIOT Backgrounds and Investigations today to learn how they can keep you and your property safe from the wrong people.
