Buying Investment Property And Screening Potential Tenants
Saturday, June 6th, 2009
My friend Erick Blackwelder has posted a helpful video on how to screen tenants for your investment property.
The most powerful words you can use to setup a healthy relationship are “Let me tell you how I work.”
Say it to yourself in the mirror as many times as necessary until you get comfortable saying it.
Give them an application. Tell them to fill it out fully. Tell them, “Be sure to put down the names and phone numbers of previous landlords because I will call them for their recommendation and their reference. That’s not negotiable.”
In your application you need to have included a clause that gives you permission to pull their credit report from the major credit reporting agencies.
There is usually about a $30 fee for running a credit report and so you will need to tell the prospect to bring with them a check for $30 for the credit check when they return to you a completed application.
Now Erick, I love the guy, no disrespect Erick, but you’ve been drinking too much of that mean juice. In California, and in my market which is the Central Valley, if you tried to demand that a prospect pay you with auto-debit or look elsewhere, EVERYONE would look elsewhere. You would never have a tenant for your property. You might found one after a year, but your ROI would be terrible because your property would be sitting vacant far too long.
Come on Erick, be honest. You’re an older guy, you’ve rented to many good tenants over the years before their was such a thing as auto-debit. Now I know you’re not saying that you never should have rented to anyone in the past that didn’t do auto-debit. So why do you recommend others do that now? It’s not realistic. You have to get your property rented as fast as possible and doing something, anything, that would make even a month or two go by longer than normal for a vacancy can be the difference between a profitable property and one that is losing money.
Try and get someone to sign up with your auto-debit method but if they refuse and want to pay by check each month, then that’s fine to. I know of a lot of people with excellent credit that have made very good tenants that just don’t want a computer to automatically pull money from their bank account, especially for a “big ticket” item like the rent because they worry about over drawing their checking account. This is a very real concern when dealing with an auto-debit for something as big as rent.
With that said, check out the video from my “hard nose” friend Erick, it’s good stuff.
Duration : 0:6:20