The Benefits of Applicant Background Checks

When you have a lot of properties and a lot of units to manage, you are also getting a lot of applications for future tenants. It’s important for the financial and physical wellbeing of both your property management company and your other tenants that your applicants are who they say they are and have a good history. It can be difficult to parse this information from a simple application or quick conversation with them, which is why most property managers use some sort of background checks on their applicants. With online property management software, running these checks is quick and easy!

Different Check Types

There are three main types of background checks that are often run on rental applicants: credit checks, eviction checks, and criminal checks. Each of these does pretty much what you would expect: credit checks review the applicant’s financial credit history, eviction checks show if applicants have previously been evicted from a different rental property, and criminal checks discover if your applicants have any sort of criminal record. These are all crucial parts of information to know before you change an applicant into a tenant. The credit checks and eviction checks let you know if this applicant has had problems before with not paying their rent, running into financial trouble, or having some other reason why they may have been removed from a lease. Criminal checks are also important to see if this person is potentially dangerous or not who they claim to be. By running these background checks, you get a fuller picture of an applicant, and can make a more informed decision on whether or not they would be a good fit for your property.

How To Run a Check

Running these background checks on online property management software is really simple. You can build these checks into your application, so that once they submit their application, the checks are automatically run on your applicant. And by applying an application fee to your application, the applicant can cover the fee of the checks, so you don’t have to worry about these fees piling up. Then, these checks are automatically set up in the online system, right next to the application the applicant filled in. This way, all the information is in one place, and it’s easy to take a look over any of the checks with ease, as they are all easily set up as PDFs. That can be helpful to download the checks if need be, as well as view them in cohesive formats. Let the system do all the preparation for you, and you can reap the benefits by making the judgements with all the necessary information!

Check Your Checks

Background checks are a super useful tool to screen applicants from another angle that an application or a conversation won’t show. You can find a good reason not to choose someone as a tenant, or you can see that they have been a model tenant! With Property Matrix, we are committed to helping you get the best tenants as easy as possible, which is why we offer a partnership with TransUnion to run criminal, credit, and eviction checks for $15 total. That’s less than what most other systems charge for just one of those checks, and we have these checks built directly into your applications. We’re committed to getting you the best tenants, and you should be too! Schedule a demo with Property Matrix today to see how else we can improve your property management experience!