How to Screen Tenants

Tenant screening is essential to any estate agent/landlord’s hunt. This screening process allows you to vet potential tenants, ensuring their suitability. You should follow a screening process carefully to ensure you pick the right tenants.

Step 1: Pre-screening questions

Before spending time and money on screening, you should ask a few questions to help weed out any undesirable characters. Many landlords add a few application questions for potential tenants to answer right after viewing.

Step 2: Collect tenant information

A basic rental application will tell you many things you need to know about your potential tenants. Some things you may want to ask are:

Where have they lived before

Who will they live within your property

Where do they work, and how much do they earn

What’s their financial history (i.e. what is their credit score, have they ever filed for bankruptcy)

Step 3: Complete a full background check

Once you’ve got a better idea of potentially approved tenants, you should complete a full background check with an external company. This check will assess their credit history, eviction history, and criminal history.

Step 4: Reference checks

The background check will have provided a significant amount of information, but there are still a few other things you can do to get the whole picture. You could talk to a past landlord, speak to the tenant’s boss, and talk to the tenant themself to get a better idea of who you are potentially housing.

Step 5: The final review

Once you’ve collected all the information you possibly can, it’s time to decide. Consider everything you have found out, and then contact the lucky/ unlucky applicants to inform them of your decision.