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!

1. Online property advertisement was made available in 2008 and is expected to undergo some additional improvements in 2009.   While it does it’s job completely at the moment, we’ll be adding additional customization to the listing pages so it can look and feel more like your own site.
2. Take applications online.  Since the properties are listed online, why not take applications online as well?  We’ll be providing landlords a customizable application where they can have potential tenants fill out the data right online and have it submitted and stored electronically for your review.  Application fee’s (if any) will be processed right online instantly.
3. A tenant portal is well under way and will likely be released within the next few weeks.  This is a location where your tenants can login with their own password and see their balance and historical payments and charges.  Also here they will be able to update their email address should it change and modify their email preferences.
4. We’re working some partnerships with other industry professionals who bring national tenant and credit screening.  We plan to integrate these directly into Rentec Direct, so when you add a new tenant, or receive an application from them, you can access their screening information with a single click.
5. Automated payment processing.  Ever wanted to setup a renter for automated withdrawal from their checking account to yours?   This technology is called ACH and we’ll be including that with Rentec Direct.

Much more too!  We have dedicated programmers who are constantly working to make Rentec Direct better.  If you have a request to make Rentec Direct a better product or work better for you, we want to hear it.  Please email it to suggesstion@rentecdirect.com.

We designed Rentec for individual property owners and investors who own and manage their own properties. Rentec direct is designed for you, the investor who may do property investing full time or part time and you own from one to one hundred properties.  The owners and designers of Rentec Direct are landlords too and we know what it is like to manage a handful of properties without the need or expense of paying a property management company.  We found the need to create Rentec Direct because there was no software application available that fit our needs fully as landlords.  As a current or potential landlord yourself, you may have experienced the same.

Rentec is built from the ground up to meet the needs of landlords managing typically between 1 to 100 properties.  Very rarely do we see a landlord or small team managing a larger set of properties, so we are able to fine tune the software to work best for this niche.

Another driving factor for us in offering Rentec for free is that generally we feel life has treated us pretty darn good.  I personally have the best family one could ask for, great friends, and live in beautiful Southern Oregon.  All this came from a lot of hard work, the help and support of our community and country, and perhaps a little luck.  One of our goals with Rentec is to give something back.  There’s thousands or more man-hours put into developing Rentec Direct, and we give away most of that for free.  It’s our way of contributing back to the landlord and investor community and saying Thank You in general.

Rentec Direct is FREE for individual landlords.  There’s no risk to try it out, so take it for a spin today.