All Forum Posts by: Kimberly H.

@Charles Campbell are you sure the people you are showing the place to can wait until August to move? Are you prescreening them at all to see if they have any hope of meeting your criteria? Especially with occupied properties, we prescreen and eliminate those who have no prayer of qualifying so we are not driving our current tenants nuts with showings for people who won't qualify anyway. We ask, what date to you want to move, what pets do you have, what is total verifiable income, and total number of occupants. You can have all your requirements in the listing and 99% of the people won't read it. We also list in MLS and the real estate agents don't even bother to ask their clients anything, a lot of these agents are wasting time driving people around who won't qualify to rent anywhere.

@Pete Perez I always get one quote that is like 3x higher than the one I end up going with. I don't understand it. Get more quotes.

@Jay P. So you can hire an attorney and they are still making you be there in person to give a statement?!??! What the heck?!?? Why can't it be a sworn affidavit??? Is your lawyer an experienced landlord-tenant lawyer in Cook County??

@Jay P.  good to know how things work in Cook County, jeesh!! How on earth has a judge not heard "the check is in the mail" excuse!! And how can a copy of a check be proof of anything?!?! Thanks for updating! Hey, what judge was it, btw?

@Chris T. Yes I run into that a lot around here in the Chicago suburbs. And it doesn't even work right. Last year I had a guy who I was trying to verify via theWorknumber and it didn't work, I called the company asking for HR and he was the HR guy!! He had to go into his HR system and fix something to get it to work. Had he not been the HR person who could fix it I doubt it would have gotten anywhere and I'm sure theworknumber wouldn't refund the $$. Plus TheWorknumber isn't free either and passing the cost on to the applicant is just another headache.

But @Terry Lao has a good point about getting bank statements that can verify the pay. I'm surprised that didn't occur to me before! Unless of course if they got f@ke paystubs they know where to get f@ke bank statements...

@Katie Shults We would in no way rent to that person, we don't want our properties to become meth labs.

Just got something similar, 5 unrelated adults wanting to see a place, represented by an agent, for a single family home. Agent had never heard of no more than 3 unrelated in single family zoning!

@Steve S. I disagree with the above, views mean nothing, it's number of showings and applications that count. 1 actual showing in one week is pretty low, at least for my area. I would guess that either you don't have good inside pictures, or it's priced to high.

@Rachel A. limit it to like four questions for the prescreen, because any more than that is just to much work. We do how many total occupants, what pets do you have, what is total verifiable household income, what move-in date do you want.  For us, the answers to those questions eliminate the most people.

I would think a judge would see right through that, and see it as an excuse to get them out. What is the real reason you want them out?