Tenant Screening: How Does It Work And Why Is It So Essential?

The majority of tenants will treat your property with respect, pay rent on time and get along with the neighbours. They will be a pleasure to deal with, making your life easier and helping to ensure the success of your investment. However, as incredible as these tenants sound, finding them can be a challenge. Your best bet is to effectively market your property to attract the right people, then carefully and thoroughly screen all applicants.

Give Yourself The Choice

Screening is of little use if only one person applies to rent your property. For that reason, marketing your property effectively is absolutely essential. You need to get your investment in front of as many prospective tenants as possible so that you can receive plenty of applications and are able to be picky when choosing your tenant.

Your property manager should be an expert when it comes to marketing. They’ll help you set the rent at an appropriate level, highlight your property’s strengths, and market it through all the most effective channels. With your property manager’s help, you should have dozens of interested parties and the power to pick and choose.

Visualise Your Perfect Tenant

Before you start screening tenants, you need to have an idea of what the perfect applicant looks like. For most, this will be a respectful, tidy person with a steady income, who intends to stay in the property for an extended period of time.

For others, the criteria may be more specific. For example, if your investment is in a quiet family area, you may want to think twice about renting it out to rowdy students or aspiring rock bands. Be sure you want to communicate your vision of the perfect tenant with your property manager. If your investment is in a quiet family area, you may want to think twice about renting it out to rowdy students.

Start Screening From First Contact

Screening your tenants involves more than just checking their income and renal history. Their character matters too. When tenants are viewing , your property manager should keep an eye on them and get to know them as much as possible. With just a quick informal chat, your property manager should keep an eye on them and get to know them as much as possible. With just a quick informal chat, your property manager may be able to find out what kind of person they are, how, their job is going, if they move often and if they’ve ever had trouble in previous rentals.

Verify With ID And Proof Of Income

If you can’t be sure that the applicant is who they say they are, there is no point in screening at all. For that reason, your property manager should request ID and proof of income from all prospective tenants. This will help you avoid tenants with dishonest intentions, or those who have trouble renting because of serious disputes in the past.

Check References

One of the most important steps of any tenant screening process is reference checking. It’s a great way to find out more about their previous renting experience, the stability of their income and impression they’ve left on people in the past.

The first call to make should be to the landlord or property manager of their last rental. Ask them how the applicants were as tenants? How did they treat the property? Did they pay their rent on time, every time?

Next, your property manager will speak to the applicant’s employer. They should ask if the applicant is likely to still be employed six months down the track, and how they are as an employee. As a general rule, great employees make good tenants.

Search the National Tenancy Database

Last of all, when your property manager has decided on their favourite applicant, they should check the National Tenancy Database. Here, they will find out if they’ve had any serious disputes with previous landlords, if they’ve ever applied for bankruptcy and if they’ve ever been to court. If you’ve complete dthe rest of the screening process to a high standard, nothing should come up here, but it is always better to be safe than sorry. If you need help finding the perfect tenants for your investment property, get in touch with our Inline Property Management team today for an experience, local property manager you can trust.

For more information or to find out how we can help you, please contact us using the form below or call us on 0800 YELLOW.