Metro Atlanta Property Manager Discusses Using a Tenant Screening Service
If your own rental properties as real estate investments, you may know that you should always screen tenants before allowing them to move into your rental units. A comprehensive screening takes quite a bit of work, and can be rather costly. Also, if you do most of the work yourself, it can take away many hours you could be spending on more profitable tasks as well as you may not have all the tools available to you to do a through screening.
One effective alternative to handling all of the tenant selection tasks yourself is to use a tenant screening service. These services offer several advantages that will benefit you as a landlord and a real estate investor.
Using a tenant screening service can save you time. Provide that you have the proper information on your application which includes the property authorizations, all you do is supply the service with the prospective tenant’s application that includes all the pertinent personal information, and they will go to work collecting information about the applicant’s credit report, rental history, employment, criminal record, and other relevant items. You won’t have to spend time making phone calls to previous landlords or ordering credit reports.
Another concern is with the increase in identity theft, credit reports are harder to come by. At SSPM, we had to have an audit so that we could see the actual credit report. While the tenant screening service is compiling data, you can be planning your next lucrative real estate investment.
A tenant screening service can save you money. Because these services purchase data in bulk, they can often obtain information more cheaply than an individual who only orders a few reports per month. Using this economy of scale, a tenant screening service can pass these savings on to you, providing you with prospective tenant profiles at a lower cost. In the Atlanta area, the cost ranges between $35 – $60.
Finally, you can obtain consistent, accurate data through a tenant screening service. Working alone, it can be difficult to obtain information that is of a consistent quality. Because tenant screening companies employ professionals who are experts at gathering data, they can often give you better, more accurate results to help you select good tenants.
One thing that we have noticed however, is there is a great deal of difference between an on-line screening service and those services that actually call to verify the data. In the past couple of weeks, we did a comparison between a new on-line service that a lot of other property managers used and our current screening service that we know makes the calls and double checks the data. We found that the data from our current service was much more accurate and detailed than that of the on-line variety. While it costs more, the cost is passed along to the tenant and provides us with much better data for us to make a decision.
No matter what you decide to do in regards to screening, I encourage you to be consistent with all of your applicants. Consistency is the key.
March 1st, 2010 at 9:50 am
Screening tenants properly could mean all the difference with you having sustained income or not. Great article.
March 2nd, 2010 at 2:11 pm
: I couldn’t agree more! Tenant screening is essential for landlords and property managers to protect themselves and reduce debt losses. However, I must say screening candidates online (if done through the right vehicle) can prove to be a better source than traditional methods for the following reasons:
1) It’s faster. Online screening can take only seconds to send a recommendation.
2) It’s less expensive. You can screen tenants online for only $25.00 using a service like TransUnion’s SmartMove (www.mysmartmove.com). I actually work for this company and have seen 20,000 landlords sign up to use SmartMove in the past year.
3) With SmartMove, applicants don’t have to supply personal information which alleviates the worry concerning ones social security number ending up in the hands of someone else.
May 29th, 2010 at 3:49 pm
A tenant screen service can keep problems from happening down the road.
June 7th, 2010 at 1:40 am
My cousin recommended this blog and she was totally right keep up the fantastic work!