How Will We Know That Tenants
are Suitable for My Property?
When a prospective tenant wants to submit an application to rent your home, they do so through RentSpree. It is an on-line application processing platform. The applicant pays for the application processing. It costs the landlord absolutely nothing. We process every tenant who is age 18 or older that will be living in the home. We want to make sure that they are suitable to rent your property.
As part of the RentSpree application, a credit report is generated for each applicant. We don’t concentrate too much on credit scores. Many times they can be low because of things that have no bearing on a tenants’ ability to pay rent. We are more interested in the amount of outstanding debt they have and the monthly payments they make. We also want to look for any delinquencies and charge-offs.
We also receive a background check through the Court system for every jurisdiction the applicant has lived. We’re mostly interested in any criminal activity and any Failure to Pay Rent and/or Eviction actions against a tenant.
The applicant must provide us with information about their current and past employment. We will verify the applicant’s current employment and income. This is done by getting at least two current earnings statements. If a tenant is self-employed, then we will request tax returns. We are most comfortable when an applicant makes approximately 3.25 times the monthly rent or more. For example, if your home will be rented for $1,500 per month, we would like the tenant to have a gross income of $4,875 per month ($58,500 per year). Obviously, this is no guarantee that we won’t have problems. Bad things happen to good people all the time.
They also tell us about the last two places they have lived. We verify their previous rental history and attempt to get whatever information we can from the current and former landlords. Sometimes, they don’t want to cooperate, so we rely on the Court records.