What are some good Tenant Screening Services?

Question

I'm a new landlord looking to get a new tenant. I was wanted to know about people's experiences with different Tenant Screening Services. I have my own paper application.

I was looking at rentprep.com, and my friend uses tenantmagic.net

do you know of any good ones? or have you had a bad experience before?

Randy Rodenhouse · Answer

I have used SmartMove by Transunion (website is mysmartmove dot com) for many years and it works well.  You create a free account and send your potential tenant an invite for a background check.  Then potential tenant receives a rental screening invite & completes their application. Then you get the tenant's credit check, criminal, eviction reports.  It is only around $40 and you can pay of have tenant pay.

Tim Miller · Answer

We use a service provided by Corelogic called MyRental.com. We've tested a few of the other services and found MyRental.com to be more informative. Example, we had a tenant moving from Virginia Beech, VA. The other services didn't catch the late rent payment filing but MyRental.com did. Another great feature of MyRental.com is the Safe Tenant Score. To stay within Fair Housing, this makes it a lot easier. We set a score of 550 or below is an automatic reject. The service is perfect but it's a great tool to have.

Melanie Thomas · Answer

Hello Michael, congratulations on embarking on your landlord journey! In our company, we typically handle around 90-150 tenant applications per month. We've recently switched to RentVine for application processing. However, before that, we relied solely on Rent Screening, which provided an exceptional service with no issues to report.

It's noteworthy to mention that there are several new entrants in the market claiming to offer foolproof tenant screening, simpler income verification, document validation, and bank verification - FinDigs being one of them. However, I must say that I'm yet to personally know anyone who has found these services significantly beneficial.

In certain aspects, I believe it's more effective to handle processes internally. Best of luck on your new venture and happy investing!

Paul De Luca · Answer

We use Zillow Rental Manager for applications which includes a credit check and background check. And we pay the $30 for a premium listing so it gets the most exposure.

Tracy Brown · Answer

Michael, a screening platform is good. However, the best way is to have your minimum standards. Have a minimum Credit Score,require good past rental history, require a minimum of 2 to 3 years consistency on same job, require a minimum of 2.5 months salary to rent ratio. Some tenants are clever when it comes to manipulating the application. Next option, increase the rent by 10% and hire a property manager.

Michael Bailey · Answer

@Michael Maliszesky Thanks for the mention and congrats on becoming a landlord! RentPrep does offer the SmartMove order through TransUnion on our website. If you want more information about our services, you are more than welcome to message me directly and we can in further detail.

Randy Rodenhouse · Answer

Smartmove has an application that you setup for each address and then Smartmove sends them an email and and they put their SSN in and the gets the background and credit and then u see results on website.

Alan Asriants · Answer

I use avail.coThey pay for the application, provide all infromation and you get:

credit report, eviction history, and criminal report

as well as: past landlord references (this is your best due dilligence!!!), pay stubs, employer info, drivers license, etc

Make sure all the info adds up, call employer to verify employment (I've seen fake paystubs before!), call all previous landlords - check public records to see if addresses and names match (people lie the most here). Good luck!

Michael Maliszesky · Answer

Thanks. Does smart move allow me to use my own application,  or is one provided?

What are some good Tenant Screening Services?

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