Tenant Screening

Tenant screening is important because almost nothing can be worse for a landlord than a chronic problem tenant. Our tenant screening service helps property owners, landlords, and property managers lease to safe and viable tenants. Not only is our tenant screening service essential to securing a return on your property investment, our service also helps landlords foster their local community by screening away convicted felons and sex offenders.

Our Tenant Screening Service is Easy

We have a simple three step tenant screening process for landlords:

  1. Enter your information and the information about your property. Our system evaluates each applicant on the basis of the property they're interested in leasing. This helps us to provide recommendations based on what a renter can likely afford.
  2. We collect the tenant's application info online. The tenant can complete your application on our website, reducing the amount of time you spend shuffling paperwork.
  3. We provide a recommendation. After our screening process is completed, we will recommend approving the application, denying the application, or approving the application with conditions.

That's it!

Tenant Screening Service

SmartTenantScreening.com uses a sophisticated and comprehensive procedure to screen tenant applicants and provide tenant recommendations. Here's how it works:

  • Tenant credit check – Few things are more important than a financially viable renter. Our credit check is designed to screen for credit worthiness, and our recommendation system carefully evaluates a potential tenant's ability and likelihood to pay their rent on-time and in full every month.
  • Tenant background check – The phrase “background check” means different things to different screening companies, but to us it means the following:
    • We check for a criminal record and a history of felony convictions
    • We investigate an applicant's rental history (see more below)
    • We look for sex offender and terrorist records (see more below)
    • We look for any instances of applicant fraud
  • Sex offender search – Screening for convicted sex offenders is desirable for a number of reasons, not the least of which is promoting a safe community for families and children.
  • Tenant rental history – We investigate all records in our database for evidence of rental problems, including checking for any history of evictions (eviction check).
  • Terrorist and OFAC alert search – Using relatively new records and information, we screen all potential renters for records of terrorist activity and Federal OFAC (Office of Foreign Asset Control) alerts.
  • Tenant fraud screening – Instances of fraud - including identity theft, incorrect or misleading information on an application, and a history of fraudulent payment – are all carefully screened.

The results from our tenant screening system are used to provide an applicant recommendation. Depending on the results, we may recommend approval, denial, or approval with conditions. This recommendation is based only on the information we find and is not at all influenced by an applicant's age, impairment or disability, industrial activity, marital, parental or carer status, physical features, pregnancy, race, religious or political beliefs or activity, sex, sexual orientation, or personal association.

What About Bad Credit?

We know that bad things happen to good people, and our screening process and recommendations reflect the fact that sometimes circumstances beyond an applicant's control can lead to credit blemishes. Depending on the results of our tenant screening procedure, we can recommend a lease structure that minimizes landlord risk while also recommending an approval.

Who Accepts or Denies A Tenant's Application?

SmartTenantScreening.com provides recommendations only – only the property owner, landlord, or management company can approve or deny an application. Based on our tenant credit check, tenant background check, tenant rental history check, sex offender, terrorist and OFAC alert search, and tenant fraud screening we will provide a recommendation to either approve an applicant, deny an applicant, or approve an applicant with conditions. This is the basis of our tenant screening service.