Tenants selection for rent

[Andrei Asorocean]

Hi everyone!! I have such question, if you guys can help me with an advice.

How you select your future tenants?

Thank you very much and have a nice day you all.

[Bjorn Ahlblad]

@Andrei Asorocean It is really a process that we follow and it works for us. We begin by placing an ad in Zillow and Apartments.com we put our criteria in the ad: 3x income, 600 credit score, first and last + deposit, MTM lease. The first 2 days we will get usually 80 responses most of whom are hopelessly under qualified it is like they never read the ad. If they call or TXT we say the response has been overwhelming-which is always true. All the applicants we get want to see the place. First thing they ask 'when can we see it'. Showing is time consuming so we save that for much later.

We ask how may animals, how many people, employer, income, where do you live now etc. At this point we can eliminate 95% of the applicants. We don't want pets and we don't want children-but we can't say that-no discrimination and we don't.  So we ask these non threatening questions, and we check them out on social media.

The group that is left we email them an app. We never follow up; we never call and say 'where is your app'. We think it is important to have them chasing us-even that is part of the selection process.

Once we have gone through the app and chased down some details, employer and LL verification, we are prepared to show the unit. And the next step is background and credit. Sometimes we have even done that prior to showing. 

It is important to tell them that you are working with others who applied before they did. Which works out to be the case anyway-nobody is ever 'first'.

Anyway, and I may have left out a thing or two, but that is basically our process.

One more thing: there are people out there making calls who are not applicants, they work for various agencies checking up on LL practices by pretending to be applicants, they want to see if you might be in violation of of fair housing, discrimination etc. Keep that in mind when going through your process.

All the best!