Criteria for Screening Tenants

Renting out your property means you will be entrusting one of your most valuable assets to strangers. But as a landlord, picking out strangers that you will allow to dwell in your property needs to be done carefully.

In any kind of rental practice, whether real estate properties or not, owners would always conduct a screening process to check their tenants one by one. However, if you relied purely on your gut instincts, the many faces and the sweet talks of your applicants can easily trick you. What you need is a more reliable basis of identifying their credibility, stability and trustworthiness.  That is why you will be needing a criteria. This helps you to objectively select your tenants.

Before you start putting up the for rent sign, the criteria for tenants should already be been laid out. This way, once the applications start coming in, you will already have an idea on what to look for.

To ease things up, every applicant should be able to completely fill out the application forms. He or she should also be able to provide various documents. These things can help you determine if a particular applicant has met your standards.

Establishing Criteria

In determining the criteria you will set, you need to consider various laws. You have to look into the federal laws or state laws related to renting. Aside from that, any criteria set should also be non-discriminating. Any property owner should be very careful about this and should ensure no applicant will be denied of tenancy due to color, race, status, religion or disability.

Examples of Criteria to Use

If you want to know more about what you can legally include in your list of criteria, here are some of them:

Good Income source and financial indicators 

This is a very important criterion. A tenant who has a good income source, stable jobs and good debt to rent ratio, is an indicator that he or she can afford the rent. Hence, this also ensures continuous flow of rental income every month. Therefore, landlords should be particular about this.

Good Credit Scores

One of the most reliable indicators of creditworthiness is credit scores. Aside from that, having good scores is indicative of how responsible the person is when it comes to settling payment dues. As a landlord, you can always use this in order to select the best of the best among the applicants.

With Rental History, References and Good Recommendations

If the tenant has history of renting, then he or she would be familiar of how the business works. He or she will have more or less a clue on what is expected of them while they rent the property. However, this is not enough. They should also have good recommendations from their former landlords. It is important that you know these things so you will have a peace of mind while you allow strangers to occupy your property. If they have good recommendations, chances are, the quality of your property will be maintained all throughout the tenancy period. Therefore, this is one of the must-haves criteria that you could use in the selection process.

Complete Verifiable Documents and Identification

You want to be able to objectively select your tenants. Therefore, you want someone who can provide documents and identification cards that can be verified among various agencies (private or government). This helps you determine if your applicants are just using someone's identity or not. Therefore, make sure you include this in your criteria.