Can I Use Social Media to Screen my Tenants? It’s no secret people love social media. Posting, retweeting, and keeping up with friends and celebrities has become a part of the daily routine for many. In fact, 7 out of every 10 Americans use social media to connect with others, engage with news content, and …
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Passive Tenant Screening for Better Property Management
Active Screening vs. Passive Screening Odds are, you aren’t familiar with what passive tenant screening is. When you think about “tenant screening,” you’ve probably got active screening on your mind. Active screening is the process by which landlords and property managers evaluate applicants, accept those that fit their requirements, and reject those that do not. …
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Fair Housing Laws: What to Know When Screening Tenants
Dealing with a bad tenant is an experience that landlords look to avoid at all costs. Usually, it means lost income, wasted time, and damaged assets. Screening tenants is one of the best steps you can take to protect yourself, your properties and your sanity. But, tenants have ways to protect themselves too. This past …
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What Information Should I Require in my Rental Application?
It’s difficult to overstate the importance of a rental application when it comes to effective tenant screening. Even a bare bones application with little more than personal contact info can be cross-referenced against a credit report to weed out many of the more obvious bad apples. But a rental application offers you an opportunity for …
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The Cost of Skipping Tenant Screening
Particularly for first time landlords, tenant screening may seem like a waste of time – an unnecessary road block standing between you and your rent checks. Who needs a credit report or background check you’re not even prepared to interpret? You trust yourself to meet a prospective tenant in person and judge whether or not …
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Understanding Background Checks: Eviction and Criminal Reports
Why Background Checks Matter As a landlord, you’re loaning one of your most valuable assets, a home, to someone who is essentially a complete stranger. That’s a pretty big deal. And as much as you’d love to believe that all prospective tenants are perfectly good people who would never damage your unit (or your trust), …
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Hard vs. Soft Credit Inquiries: How They Affect You and Your Applicants
When you rent your property to a tenant, they agree to pay you a certain amount of money in exchange for access to a living or working space. Rent is an obligation to pay money owed and, in this way, is just debt in another context. Understanding a renter’s history of paying past debts can …
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Interpreting Your Tenant’s Credit Report: What You Should Know
After a lease agreement, a credit report is arguably the most important document a landlord can learn to handle. If a tenant has a history of late payments or defaulting on debt, he or she is likely to do it again. Fortunately, running a tenant screening report or purchasing a credit check is a pretty …
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Announcing Innago Tenant Screening
We are proud to announce a major new feature set on Innago: Online Tenant Screening. Powered by our partners at TransUnion, Innago Tenant Screening includes a full credit report, a national criminal database search, and an optional eviction check shared instantly in an easy to read and easy to manage format.* Additionally, Innago will now …
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Service Animals and Emotional Support Animals in Rental Properties
We all know the dangers: pets can destroy hardwood floors, tear up carpets, frighten neighbors, and cause a regular and disruptive disturbance. For this reason, many landlords choose to prohibit any tenant with a pet from renting their property or unit, and they are entirely justified, both legally and ethically, in doing so. Things become …
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