Tenant Screening | Credit Report | Legal Background Check Service

So I've reached my goal of becoming an investment rental property owner or manager, and I've got empty units to fill. How do I avoid destroying all my hard work? How do I avoid deadbeat tenants, and how do I avoid getting sued by bad-apples that I've turned away?

The easy answer is to always do a thorough credit report background check on each applicant that turns in a form, but you have to be careful: using the wrong kind of tenant screening service, or using the right screening service in an inappropriate manner can open the door to civil action (lawsuits). Not cool.

You do NOT have to be an attorney to know what you need to know as a landlord RE: the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA). What you DO need to know is that if you are denying a rental application (see what I collect on my forms - tenant screening) based on information you got from a credit background report or other tenant screening service, you had better be certain that service is FCRA compliant.

Sometimes reading the fine print of online services is necessary to figure out whether or not a tenant screening service is compliant (you can see the two types of tenant screening services here).

Cheap credit background check services are not FCRA compliant, but they can be useful in verifying basic application information - so long as the information you do use does not form the basis of your ultimate rental denial decision. Cheap background check services provide more information than you typically require, and are not always vetted for complete accuracy the way a fully compliant tenant screening service would be.