Check multiple social media accounts for rental applicant?

Question

Is there a way to search all major social media account about "joe doe" from one place? Where I would be able to drill down to the right Joe Doe by providing information that I have on his rental application?

• email address
• Location (state or even city and state)
• phone number

What is the "system" that you have in place to check social media accounts for your applicants?

Vitaliy Merkulov · Answer

@Kim Younkin many landlords check applicant's credit reports, evictions, bad tenant database, plus social networks to see if they can find any "red flags" about the applicants.

For example, if you have a no-smoking policy, and you see the applicant's social media show them smoking. Or if you have a no-pets policy, but see photos of the applicant's pet in recent posts.

Some landlords even said that when checking social media account on one of their applicants, they found a post that said something like "the next house will be the best party house"

Right now, I just google the applicant's name and find any social media accounts associated with their name. If their profile is not private, I try to look at their posts to see if I can find any "red flags" or something that would not add up to their application.

I'm trying to find a way to search all the social media accounts from one place. Does anyone else have the same need? Or you don't have a problem googling your applicant?

Alan DeRossett · Answer

FICO seems to be useless these days. If they had perfect credit they would buy I just use Google it only takes ten minutes

Randall Brown · Answer

Judgements/ liens will be removed from the FICO formula.

Will they also be removed from the reports entirely?

Vitaliy Merkulov · Answer

Also, I'm trying to find other ways to screen tenants better since credit reports will no longer have negative reports on 12 million people starting July 1 2017

Kim Younkin · Answer

Gotcha. That makes a lot of sense, and I can see why you're looking for a one-stop shop so you can scale the process as your number of units under management grows.

Kim Younkin · Answer

@Vitaliy Merkulov, hi...I saw a similar question yesterday and wonder, what is your reasoning for checking social media accounts? We don't do that when we screen applicants and I'm just curious. To answer your question, though, I don't think there is a platform that consolidates all of a person's social media accounts for review...