[quote=svelte]To be fair, my father had rentals when it was much harder to do background / credit checks. It might be easier to screen prospective tenants now.
He has long since sold his rentals.
But better tenants still won’t eliminate the midnight “the water heater just went” phone calls…unless you go with a prop mgt company. Then you have a whole new set of problems of the fox watching the henhouse sort…
Buying rentals is tempting, granted. I still re-evaluate it in my mind from time to time. But then I realize how successful I’ve been at keeping my life simple and streamlined and chuck the idea altogether.[/quote]
Parmount and svelte.
Well my experience in the past in bay area was… I selected the first folks that contact me who (1) meet my rent asking price (2) claim to have good credit and no criminal background (3) have an income that can support my asking rent, and who all check out with credit/employment/background checks.
To this end, I and finding out the following
1. Getting someone’s credit is pretty easy these days. Most of the 3 credit bureau have website that provided you know the person’s email address, you send them a request for credit file. They pay for a credit file and send you a secure link to their credit file..You view there credit file.
2. If your tenant candidate happens to work at a large company most likely, the company already has done a background check as part of pre-employment verification, so it is unlikely one would need to do a criminal background check on top of that for someone who still employed there.. So it seems like the only task is to be verifying that the person still works there…which is easy..Most large companies provides an HR number to do this… Furthermore, most HR’s also allow verification of salary, whether they are full time employees or contractors, and how long they have been working.
Am I missing something, or is there some flaw in my thinking?
