Rentec Direct

You’ve asked, we’ve listened!  Lease tracking is now available in Rentec Direct.  Here’s how you can use it today.

For new placements.  When placing a new tenant, simply specify the lease end date when moving them in; it is right below the move-in date.  The system takes care of the rest and will track the lease throughout their tenancy. You can update the lease expiration at any time by clicking the Tenants tab, then the modify link next to the lease expiration date.

For existing tenants, there’s a little secret to adding a lease.  Click on the Tenants tab, then click the move out link.   At the top of the page is a link that says “if you just want to add a lease expiration date, click here“.  Click that link, and you will be prompted to add the lease expiration date for the existing tenant.

Of course, lease tracking would not be complete without a report giving you a rundown of which leases are ending.  A new report is available within the Reports tab named Lease Expiration.  An example of this report is displayed above, click it to expand the image.

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I heard it again today, a couple already battered by cancer treatment telling us that they just got a 10 day eviction notice because the bank is foreclosing on their landlord’s property.  When they leave the hospital they will have 5 days to pack up and move and find a new place to live, all due to something that was not of their causing.

If you are currently renting, how can you find out if your landlord is in trouble?  It’s easier than you might think.  In most cases, in about 5 minutes you can find out, without leaving your comfy chair.  My favorite foreclosure listing search is published by First American Title at http://www.realquest.com.  They have a flashy site which lets you type in your address and see a map of your neighborhood.   If you have a yellow flag posted on your property that means your landlord has been defaulting on payments and the bank is soon to take it back, usually within the next 90 days.  A green flag means the bank already took it, and a orange flag means there could be just a few days before you’ll be seeing your notice.

Realquest covers most of the US, but not all of it.  Everywhere has foreclosures, so if you don’t see any flags in your neighborhood, I would recommend backing up your search with a trip down to the courthouse to see if any foreclosure notices have been filed and keep an eye in the local paper since they have to post them there as well.  Also, calling your landlord and asking if there’s any risk of them losing the house could work too as a last ditch effort.

If nothing else, I hope these tips help one person find out early and be able to secure a new residence before having to deal with an extremely short notice from a bank.

Landlords – It’s incomprehensible to let this happen.  So many property owners don’t even know if their rental property is delivering a profit, or even breaking even.  You can use free property management software to accurately track if your properties are breaking even and avoid this mess in the first place.

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A couple years ago I had this question myself. At that time I visited the local credit reporting office in my town, and while they used to run screens on behalf of landlords have stopped that activity.  That is also true of pretty much every local screening company.  Property managers can run background screens, but only for their own clients.  This leaves the question, how does a private landlord screen their prospective tenants without a huge hassle?  I’ve been asked this dozens of times and  I’m happy to say I have the answers.

If you are a landlord, it’s actually quite easy.  The FCRA allows “tenant screening” as a permissible purpose for running certain background checks, including full criminal background screens, bankruptsy, eviction, and judgement checks.  You just need a reliable provider.  This can be obtained easy enough by googling ‘tenant screening’.  Which ones are reliable though?

What I’ve found is most tenant screening companies are using extremely limited databases.  None of them actually disclose what data they are using, or how they got it, or how complete it is.  With that, it’s more or less just a guess as to if they have valid data.  Most tenant screening companies suggest you use one of their packages which include a “nationwide” search of some sorts.  I’ve found these less than accurate as well because their nationwide results tend to only have results if they specifically have already scanned for that particular record.  What are the chances?  Pretty slim indeed.  It often equates to a substantial investment in invalid results.  I’ve even heard that some landlords use multiple screening companies paying two to three times what they should as a result.

Because of the guesswork, and game of chance out there, and since we have lots of landlords using Rentec Direct for it’s property management software capabilities, we’ve worked out a partnership with a premier data screening wholesaler to be able to provide tenant screening services directly to our customers.  The quality of the data is second to none.

One might ask, “how is it different than the rest”?  Great question!  While we offer similar nationwide and statewide searches, most of our nationwide and statewide databases are updated extremely frequently with complete records from that state.  This differs from many screening companies.  Additionally, and this is a major difference, we offer an intelligent search (Intellisearch) feature which at no cost to you scans the entire previous address history of your prospective tenant.  It then recommends the specific local products designed to give you the most accurate results for this tenant.  After all, why spend 4 times as much out there on a broad nationwide search when you can learn the specific locations this tenant has lived and run state and county level searches which produce up to date, and flawless results for as little as $6.  By the way, our comprehensive nationwide criminal, which includes the nationwide sex offender database, is only $9.95 for Rentec members.

We’re currently offering a 2 month FREE trial to Rentec Pro which includes a 30% discount on all screening products.

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Did you know that in a brief survey I’ve found that 9 out of 10 landlords do not properly screen their new tenants?  Granted, the term “properly” is somewhat arbitrary.  Here’s how I define a proper tenant screening.

First and foremost it’s absolutely vital you know the criminal history of your new tenants.  Do you want the liability of renting to a convicted felon in your property?   A proper background screen will give you address history for your new tenant, which is good for verifying the legitimacy of their application as well as knowing just where to run criminal background reports on.  Did you know the typical “nationwide” criminal report is simply a compilation of that particular screening agencies information?  More often than not it seems, those nationwide reports do not include any records.  That’s why you see “no data for subject” so often when running them.  For this reason it is absolutely vital to run the background reports based on the address history of the subject.

The second thing I want to know is has this tenant ever had any judgments, liens, or bankruptcies.  If they rented in the past and defaulted or caused a hardship on a previous landlord they most likely have a judgment against them if the landlord turned them into any form of collection.  If bankruptcies or liens show up in the tenant history it also gives a good example of how responsible they have been with their bills in the past as well.

There are a couple really cheap supplemental reports which are optional, but often a good idea.  Performing a SSN validation usually only costs a couple dollars and confirms this person is who they say they are.  A good SSN validation will also include complete address history.   You can also search the federal government maintained terrorist database if you are so inclined.

Running a credit report used to be on my list of must have reports; however, rules have recently changed which prevent private landlords from running credit reports.  If you have the ability, I find verifying a tenant’s current bills, including their new rent payment, vs their income is useful to see if they can afford to rent.

So why is it that 90% of landlords aren’t properly screening their tenants?  It usually boils down to choosing the wrong screening vendor, or product.   From my research, most landlords run what is usually referred to as a “nationwide criminal” report because it sounds like it searches the whole country, and usually is fairly cheap.   The unfortunate part is, these reports often do not do an exhaustive search of every state’s records and therefore do not have complete or accurate results.   They more often than not are very old databases as well.  It is vital to know your tenant’s address history so you can choose the correct databases to search.

The second important thing to know is if the records you received valid.  If you receive a hit on a statewide search, it is absolutely critical to check with the county in which the record originated to ensure validity.   In fact, a landlords use of non-public information is dependant on this step.  You must verify a record with the county prior to using the information as a basis for rejecting an application.   Your screening agent should be able to do this for you.

Finally, one last critical point to address.  Run background reports on every applicant.  This includes husband, wife, roommates, co-signers and anyone over the age of 18 who is going to be living in the household.  Most landlord charge an application fee per-person to cover these expenses.  It is completely expected nowadays.

Rentec Direct now offers complete tenant screening integrated into our already popular property management software!   We provide you by default our Intellisearch query which, at no cost to you, searches your prospective tenant’s address history and tells you which reports you need to run to get accurate results.  We back it up with statwide criminal comprehensive searches, county level queries, judgement and liens searches, as well as an array of important supplimental searches.  We also are offering 30% off regular pricing which makes Rentec Direct’s tenant screening the most economical choice available!

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Rentec Direct is pleased to release the ability for all our users (both free as well as Pro members) to be able to run criminal background and tenant screening checks on your tenants or potential tenants.

It’s super simple too!  Just login to your Rentec Direct account (if you don’t have one, signup now for free in less than 2 minutes).   If you are using Rentec Direct for online applications, when you receive an application, simply click the ‘Background Check’ to initiate the background screening tools.  Otherwise, click on Reports, then Tenant Screening Reports to initiate a new report or view your existing ones.

Not only is it simple, but it’s very inexpensive.  We’ve reviewed many tenant screening outfits, and being landlords ourselves we’ve discovered the pricing is prohibitive in most cases to do comprehensive criminal background checks on every applicant.  As landlords, we typically charge a $25 application fee and that never seemed to cover the costs of a decent criminal background report.  NOT ANYMORE!  Rentec Direct has teamed up with the nation’s more comprehensive supplier of criminal reports, and formed an exclusive arrangement to provide these reports to Rentec Direct users at a substantial discount.    For example, a complete nationwide super criminal search, which includes sex offender registration for all 50 states, costs only $10.00*.

More information and sample reports are available over here.

*Pricing accurate as of the date of this post.  Pricing could vary in the future.

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There are frequently small improvements which get added to Rentec Direct which often do not get the attention they deserve.  Someday we hope to have a complete changelog posted of every little update, no matter how insignificant, for those who may be interested.  In the meantime, here’s a few updates that have happened so far in 2009.

Attachments to existing transactions: While it’s been possible for some time to add an attachment to a transaction as it’s being built, you can now add an attachment to any existing transaction by editing the transaction, and choosing ‘add attachment’.

Review deleted tenants and properties: Prior to this improvement, when a property or tenant was deleted, they were gone forever.  Now, you can review any deleted tenant or property by clicking ‘Show Deleted Tenants’ or ‘Show Deleted Properties’ in the lower right corner of the screen.  This gives you the added advantage of expiring tenants for which you no longer interact with so they do not take up screen real-estate, but the ability to review all their details if the need arises.

Tenant Portal: A full announcement can be found here.  The tenant portal allows tenants to login and review their own accounting and make minor setting changes for email preferences.  Soon tenants will be able to make payment arrangements within the tenant portal.

Online Applications: Save the paper and hassle of delivering paper applications, and storing them in the endless file folders most of us keep.  Take applications online through Rentec Direct’s new online application system.  Full announcement here.

Small bug fixes: Rentec Direct is a dynamic web based application.  Every now and then a Rentec user might use the application in a way we had not anticipated.  Sometimes that can result in the system not understanding the data, or treating it in a manner that is not anticipated by the user.  This happens with every application ever developed by any software company in the world.  Rentec Direct is on top of these when they happen and fix them on the spot.  These repairs, although infrequent, happen behind the scenes and your version of Rentec Direct is automatically updated when they do.

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A great new feature which improves upon the online listings for your properties, is the new online application features.

We’ve designed a fully configurable and customizable online applications system for you to use which will help qualify prospective tenants quickly.

If you haven’t already seen how easy it is to publish your properties online at no additional costs to you, visit http://www.rentecdirect.com/details/publish_vacancies.php for a quick demonstration.  Additionally with the online application feature enabled, an apply button will show on your listings and allow prospective tenants to apply right there.  Be sure to login and visit the settings tab to set any preferences and custom questions you may have for your applicants.

The information is automatically captured and shows up within your properties in Rentec Direct.  Simply look at your properties tab, and any unread applications will show up right under the property name.  All read and archived applications are available by choosing the property and viewing the “Stored Applications” link.

Our goal at Rentec Direct is to make your property management experience as simple as possible.  We keep this in mind with every new feature we create.  When you review an online application, you have three options.  Decline, Run Background checks, and Approve and Add tenant.   For the background checks and adding tenants, we automatically copy the information provided by the tenant into the applicable forms so you don’t have to retype any information.  You then have the opportunity to edit it as well, and with only a couple clicks you’ve added all the new data necessary for a new tenant.

p.s. Background screening is the next major feature Rentec Direct will be releasing.  It’s right around the corner.  Soon you will be able to, with just a click, screen any existing or prospective tenants via various national, state, and local databases.  For in-depth searches, we’ll even send somebody into the applicable counties courthouse to retrieve records when needed.  Stay tuned, we’re excited about this upcoming feature and will announce it right here the moment it is ready!

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Rentec Direct is pleased to announce the renter portal.  Just like landlords and property managers can login to view account details, balances, etc; you can offer similar functionality to your tenants.

Tenants can login using their own username and password and view limited details about their account.  This reduced screenshot shows the summary screen that a tenant who is Overdue would see.  A paid up account would see their next payment due date, and the amount due.

Additionally tenants can review their statement, and make minor setting changes, such as email address updates, and email receipt preferences.

To use this feature, login and edit the tenant you wish to have access and check ‘Enable’ on Tenant Portal.  Be sure you have an email filled in for the tenant as this will be their username, and the password will be their password for accessing the portal.  If you leave the password blank, the system will automatically generate a random password for you.

Tenants access the portal by visiting http://www.rentecdirect.com/ and clicking Login, or directly by going to http://www.rentecdirect.com/tenants/

In the future, for landlords who have merchant services or electronic draft enabled for their tenants, tenants will be able to make rent payments directly from this interface.

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