Tenant Screening: Accessing Bad Check Databases

Wouldn’t you like to find out if an applicant has written a bad check before you rent to them, or make sure the check they offered to you is good before you accept it and give them the keys to your property?

The TeleCheck® Check Verification Service is available to all AAOA members, including free members, either alone or with an AAOA screening package.

TeleCheck is well-known for assisting merchants in separating good check writers from bad ones, allowing them to adopt a liberal check acceptance policy that will benefit both the merchants and their customers.

These same national databases are available to landlords through AAOA and contain real-time information from more than 306,000 businesses and financial institutions. 

TeleCheck offers the most accurate check verification service in the industry. These databases provide merchants with continually updated information including bad check activity as it occurs, automated inquiries using the consumer’s identification (Driver’s License or State ID) as well as checking account data.

An applicant’s check writing history can indicate what type of renter they will be.

The basic Verification service quickly separates good and bad check risks using TeleCheck’s negative database. This database comprises more than 51 million bad check records and can help detect a poor rental prospect, as well as a fraudulent application.

The Verification with Risk Management service uses both TeleCheck’s check writer activity and negative databases along with its risk management system to identify not only bad check writing risks, but also good ones. The risk management service utilizes TeleCheck’s risk and predictive-modeling systems to analyze over 30 variables to predict the probability of a check being good. These assessment tools include regression modeling, neural networks, & decision tree analysis.

To access the service visit www.joinaaoa.org, and sign up for one of our membership options, including free membership, or our new limited membership that allows access to credit reporting.  Premium members receive discounts on tenant screening.

See a sample TeleCheck Verification Report.  

See more Tenant Screening articles. 

American Apartment Owners Association offers discounts on products and services related to your commercial housing investment including REAL ESTATE FORMS, tenant debt collection, tenant background checks, insurance and financing. Find out more at www.joinaaoa.org.

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Tags: tenant+screening, bad+checks, tenant+background+checks, telecheck, apartment+owners, landlords, real+estate+forms

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Filed under: AAOA Forum, Credit Screening

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 22nd, 2009 at 12:57 pm and is filed under AAOA Forum, Credit Screening. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

1. AAOA - American Apartment Owners Association » 5 Tenant Screening Tips for Today’s Economy said at April 2nd, 2009 at 2:14 pm

   [...] A paycheck stub? A W-2 form or tax return? A social security card?  See our related feature, Tenant Screening: Accessing Bad Check Databases.    Let us know what you think by commenting below. For questions about our blog, [...]

2. Fred & Sandra said at November 9th, 2009 at 10:39 am

   We invested in real estate for years. TeleCheck® Check Verification Service is expensive and catches about half the bad checks. You also need to recheck every time you receive a monthly check payment.

   We found a free check collect service that simply transfers fund from the check writer’s account to ours for free when we deposited a bad check. They also provide a weekly list of local bad check writers so we could watch for our renters showing up on it. We’d then ask for a money order.

   Fred & Sandra
   cfd@satx.rr.com

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