Don’t Botch Your Criminal Background Checks

ArrestGiven the rising crime in our urban areas, property owners must be concerned with introducing a dangerous or undesirable tenant into their building.
The proliferation of drugs and gangs in cities throughout the United States has turned once beautiful neighborhoods into blighted and unsafe war zones.
It is bad enough to find that your applicant left their last address because they were evicted. It’s even worse if they left their previous address because they were paroled!
As a property owner, you must protect your tenants as well as your investment by doing a tenant background check.
You can do a tenant background check because nearly all criminal records are public. Generally, the easiest access to criminal records is through your tenant screening provider. When ordering your screening report, most companies offer an option of a criminal tenant background check.
The response varies from immediate (online) up to a couple of days depending upon the county or state you are pulling records from. Because there is no single source for criminal background checks nationwide, your information provider must access from different repositories throughout the country. Therefore, criminal background checks are usually priced on a per county or per state basis.
Before ordering a criminal background report on a prospective tenant, it is important that you have sufficiently cross-checked the application. Once you are satisfied that the address history is accurate, you can then request the criminal background from a specific county or state.
American Apartment Owners Association offers discounts on products and services for landlords related to your real estate investment including REAL ESTATE FORMS, tenant debt collection, a tenant background check, insurance and financing. Find out more at joinaaoa.To subscribe to our blog, click here.