Property Management
How To Find Great Tenants: The Best Tenant Screening Services
Last Updated Jan 18, 2022
Table of Contents
- Approach #1: Conduct your own tenant screening
- Approach #2: Hire a tenant screening service to manage the process
- Approach #3: Hire a property manager to manage applicants and tenant screening
- Approach #4: Work with Belong to find the best long-term residents for your home
- Find out how Belong is making renting lovable
When you place a tenant in your home, who you choose can make or break your rental experience. Someone who is late on their rent or damages your home can be a costly nightmare for landlords. What you want is a person or family who is reliable with rent and trustworthy, treating the place as they would their own.
Finding that perfect fit is a big deal, it’s why tenant screening services and property managers are so popular, helping to take the burden off landlords.
There are four approaches you can take to finding great tenants:
1. Do your own vetting of tenant applications with a mix of research and screening services
2. Outsource background checks to a tenant screening service
3. Hire a property management company to manage applications and tenant screening
4. Hire Belong to take a human approach to tenant screening, pairing all the necessary checks with interviewing potential residents for the perfect long-term fit
Before we dive into the ins and outs of each approach, the best advice we can give is to remember that tenants are more than a financial transaction. They are people looking for a place to call home. If you want reliable people who will treat your home as their own, you need to treat them as such.
This is why Belong refers to renters as ‘residents’, not tenants. By treating everyone in our residential network with mutual respect, combining best-in-class technology with a human-centered approach, we can foster a feeling of belonging that attracts the kind of people you want to live in your home.
Approach #1: Conduct your own tenant screening
If you want to go it alone and manage your own rental applications, you will need to conduct a series of necessary checks manually and with a bit of help from some screening services. You should also brush up on Fair Housing Laws to ensure your ads and questions don't discriminate against any potential applicants.
Your tenant screening process should examine the following:
- Identity, to verify who they claim to be
- Financial stability/ability to service the asking rent
- Employment and work history
- History of renting
- References from employees and previous landlords or property managers
Tenant identify and past experiences in the rental market can be verified using online tenant screening services including:
Don’t forget to ask for and contact references to verify any information received and be on the lookout for any accidental or willful omissions/deceit.
Approach #2: Hire a tenant screening service to manage the process
If you want to manage part of the process yourself but need some help, you can enlist the help of a tenant screening service that will provide you with a background check and necessary reports for review.
Background checks, criminal record and credit rating checks are typically covered by tenant screening services. Keep in mind that these checks are just the basics of tenant screening to rule out financial red flags. The rest of the process still needs to be performed by you or your property manager.
To help you do the best screening, you’ll want a service that offers a these 5 services:
1. Consumer credit report (from any of Experian, Equifax or Transunion)
2. Eviction records search
3. Criminal records search
4. Sex offender registry search
5. Employment verifications
Here are a few tenant screening services to consider:
Approach #3: Hire a property manager to manage applicants and tenant screening
Outsourcing the entire process can take a lot of work and weight off your shoulders. This is why tenant screening is a big part of what property management companies offer when managing your home. They will look after the marketing and advertising and vet tenants, then provide you with options that fit your criteria. Just watch for discrimination, you can be be careful about choosing a resident who can afford the rent, but you can’t be picky about who you choose based on things like religion, race, or family size for example.
Approach #4: Work with Belong to find the best long-term residents for your home
Belong is a modern-day alternative to property management. We’ll list and advertise your home across all major platforms, with integrations into sites such as Zillow and Zumper. Getting applications directly into our system means we can respond faster, vetting potential residents quickly and keeping your vacancy rates low.
And while we use the best-in-class technology to find and get applications, we will treat every potential resident as a person, looking for the right fit for your home long-term. This means the person or family you’re sharing your home with isn’t just financially responsible, but also more likely to care for your home as their own.
In fact, we’re so confident with our resident screening process that we guarantee your rent every month, regardless of when it’s paid by the resident. We also offer up to $15,000 in legal protection from evictions of any tenant chosen by Belong, should that situation ever arise.
Find out how Belong is making renting lovable
Whether you’re new to the rental market, dealing with a problematic property management company or burnt out on self-managing your rental home, Belong can help.
Belong is not a property management company, but a residential network offering unique services to both homeowners and their residents. From not charging fees for the essentials to guaranteeing rent, Belong will partner with you to achieve financial freedom. And you'll never need to lift a finger. Learn more and find out if your home is eligible (even if you’re mid-lease!) at belong.com/homeowners.
