Buildium background check issues

[Scott Titus]

We own 167 apartment units and have been using Buildium as our one-stop software. Last month (September) we had a tenant reach out to us about a new tenant we recently placed. The current tenant told us she didn’t feel safe around him considering his lengthy prior convictions. We have a pretty strict screening process and use Buildium for every tenant we place and also do not rent to anyone with a felony. We were adamant that the concerned tenant was mistaken as the new tenant came back with zero criminal history (other than minor traffic). This is where it gets interesting, the concerned tenant was also adamant the new tenant was a felon because he told her he had only gotten out of prison a couple of few months ago.

Considering we live in Missouri, I decided to run a free search on CaseNet, a system in Missouri that lets you search for legal records - low and behold, I found our mew tenant and he had an EXTENSIVE criminal history dating back a couple of decades. Armed robbery, burglary, sex crime convictions, narcotics, etc. These were not crimes that should have been missed by Buildium. Obviously this created a panic in my wife who is our PM, so I started running several of our most recently placed tenants and identified numerous inconsistencies in the reports Buildium was providing.

My wife spent hours on the phone with Buildium customer service and kept getting bounced around to different people, but eventually ended up on the phone with the 3rd party company Buildium uses to run their backgrounds. The 3rd party company confirmed they did find all the records on the potential candidates, but could not explain why Buildium was not displaying those results. Hours more on the phone with Buildium and we still have no answers as to why this has happened. Obviously this has created quite the concern for us as this is our primary source of background checks.

I’m curious if anyone else has encountered this, and if so, how did you remedy it? If you haven’t encountered this, you may want to double check tenants if you’re using Buildium because I cannot imagine this is an “us” problem. Please let me know, I’m hoping to find others so we can address this.

[Elealeh Fulmaran]

Scott, that’s scary and you’re right to act fast. Trust but verify: pause all new move-ins through Buildium screening, add a second-source check now using your state database (CaseNet), plus a national screen directly with the third-party provider, and document mismatches. For safety, perform immediate courtesy check-ins with neighbors and your PM, and enforce your lease criteria if the tenant falsified info. Push Buildium for a written root-cause and timeline; if they stall, route all screenings outside Buildium until fixed and audit your last 6–12 placements.