Tenant Screening for Rental Homes
Fast and Reliable Property Management has developed some of the most effective marketing plans for rental homes. We keep our prospective tenant funnels full, including referrals from existing tenants. However, all of that is of no value if the wrong tenant ends up in your home. From non–payment of rent to damages and premature vacancy, there are a number of very costly problems that can result from lax tenant screening and acceptance procedures.
We will handle every facet of non–desirable tenant removal for you, but our goal is to never have a need to do so. Avoidance through exhaustive tenant screening and selection procedures is how we keep our homeowners happy and profitable as rental property owners.
Initial Phone Interview
Some prospective tenants will contact us via email or with a form on your home’s web page at our site. Others will call us. Prior to an office visit and application processing, we’ll normally have a conversation on the telephone. It will not be detailed, but we begin the tenant screening process with this conversation. We ask questions that help us to legally determine if they’re a possible candidate for a more exhaustive screening process. Some never get past this phone call simply because our questions determine that they’re not suitable for financial or other reasons.
Rental Property Tenant Application
We facilitate the tenant application process with our online application form, as this makes it more convenient and retains more prospective tenant applicants early in the process. Whether they use the online form or come into our office to fill one out, we have developed a very thorough application to ferret out any potential problems and filter out potentially problematic tenants.
Credit and Reference Checks
The information on the tenant application is extensive, as we use it to check not only the prospective tenant’s credit history, but also their past rental history and rent payment habits. We call past landlords and personal references. Family information is recorded in case we need to locate tenants after move–out.
Final Pre-Lease Interview
Once all of the above tenant screening procedures are completed, a final meeting in our office is used to clear up any open questions or ambiguous information prior to execution of the lease.
A process this thorough does take a little time, however we’ve found that this level of scrutiny provides a great return on our investment of time and staff involvement. Our homeowner clients experience some of the lowest vacancy, credit loss, and tenant damage rates in the Kitchener, Waterloo, Cambridge and Guelph rental markets.
