Why is tenant screening such an important tool for anyone who deals in rental property? Tenant screening can save you a lot of money, and heartache as well. A reputable background check company can screen your tenants for you, and the results can help you to decide whether or not you want to rent to the tenants who have applied.

What does a good tenant check consist of? You should ask for, and receive the following information from any potential tenant - the addresses and telephone numbers of their current and prior landlords, their Social Security number, current address and telephone number, their reason for moving, their place of employment, a bank reference, and at least two character references. Also, have the person sign a statement agreeing to a criminal background check, reference and credit check. All of this information can be collected on a comprehensive application form which you will provide. Make sure you include all of the questions on this application that you deem necessary to check out potential tenants. This is necessary so that the company you choose to do a tenant screening can have enough information to do a through investigation.

Ideally, all of the information on the application should be verified, and this is where a tenant screening service can save you a lot of time. If for some reason the company doing your screening cannot verify some of the info, this should send up a red flag as far as that tenant is concerned. You would be surprised at how often people will get creative with a rental application! Obviously, they have no idea just how through a background check can be, and that their lies will be found out.

Through tenant screening is absolutely mandatory. Bad tenants usually realize that they might have trouble finding a decent place to rent, so they use various tactics to make themselves look better. You want to rent your property to someone who will pay their rent on time and will attempt to take care of your property, follow any rules that you may have established, and are in general, decent people.

A good tenant screening service can keep you from renting your property to unsavory characters that might damage it or slip town without paying you the rent they owe. When you consider the amount of information that a tenant screening service will quickly supply you with, the small fee that they charge will seem well worth it! Plus, many landlords pass this charge on to their potential tenants by listing on the application they use that there is a fee for the background check. So, it can be essentially free for you to get this vital information.

These background check professionals can check at the court house where the person lived in the past as well as have access to huge databases of information that are not available to just anyone not in the screening business. It would take you a long time to compile all this information yourself. A tenant screening service can make renting your property very easy, with less fear of renting to the wrong person. Don’t risk losing income on your property by agreeing to rent to someone unless you have had their background thoroughly checked out! Tenants move around from property to property now days, and it can be quite difficult to keep up with them without the use of professional methods.

Wouldn’t it be nice to know that your renters will not pay their rent with a bad check, or move out of your property in the middle of the night right before the rent is due? By taking advantage of a reputable tenant screening service, your worries will be fewer when it comes to finding renters you can trust.