3 Reasons Landlords Should Require Tenant Background Checks

Background checks are one of the most important parts of tenant screening, which is the process that helps you answer this main question: Who should you choose to live in your rental property?

While tenant background checks provide many benefits, certain cities don’t allow landlords to include them during the tenant screening process. However, if your local laws do allow for tenant background checks, it’s advised to include them during the tenant screening process to find quality tenants. Here are three reasons you might require them in your screening process.

1. Safety Precautions

When you’re considering who to rent to, you should think of it as who you are allowing in your building and your community. It is your responsibility to your community to choose tenants who won’t put anyone at risk.

While simply having a criminal history is not a valid reason to deny a tenant, landlords should assess each criminal history on a case-by-case basis and make sure that a particular tenant will not pose problems to other tenants, the property, or the landlord.

2. Liability Protection

By requiring a tenant background check, you are setting yourself up to know as much valuable information as possible. It’s important to note that if you skip a tenant background check, you may be liable if something goes wrong since you can be sued for negligence.

Furthermore, your reason for accepting or denying an applicant is important. According to Fair Housing laws, you cannot deny an applicant based on discriminatory factors like familial status, sex, disability, religion, color, race, or national origin.

You are allowed to deny an applicant based on criminal history, but you have to prove that your decision is meant to preserve the safety of your property and your community. You cannot use criminal history to deny an applicant as a cover-up for discriminatory reasons. It has to be clear that you are rejecting him or her because of a presumed, reasonable risk based on your screening criteria that you have applied to all other prospective tenants.

3. Reduce Tenant Turnover

By requiring a tenant background check, you are conveying to prospective tenants that you have a rigorous tenant screening process. This helps attract tenants who will put in the effort to meet your criteria, and are hopefully more likely to stay long-term or renew their lease, saving you time and money because you won’t have to look for a new tenant right away.

How Do Tenant Background Checks Work?

Avail has partnered with TransUnion to provide comprehensive background check information to DIY landlords across the country. After a tenant authorizes a background check, TransUnion scans various databases for connections between identity information and a criminal record. Criminal history searches are typically done with identity criteria like name, date of birth, and address.

Criminal courts typically don’t include social security numbers (SSNs) on criminal records because criminal reports are public information and they want to reduce identity theft. For this reason, SSNs are typically not used for the database scan.

However, background checks still require an SSN in order to verify identity by matching an applicant’s name to their SSN. Adding more criteria (like middle names) also helps enrich the search of public records because it means the inquiry has a wider net.

In order to start a criminal background check, you’ll need the applicant’s approval of a criminal background check and the applicant’s name, date of birth, address, and SSN.

This information can be easily and securely gathered if you use our tenant background check at Avail. You send a request to your prospective tenant to authorize the credit and background check. Once the tenant has authorized it, they securely input their SSN. You never see the SSN, which reduces your liability and provides comfort for the tenant.

With the help of TransUnion, our reports instantly pull data from the following sources:

  • Felonies and misdemeanors from state and local jurisdictions
  • Sex offender public registries from all 50 states
  • Federal data including:
    • Drug Enforcement Administration
    • FBI’s Most Wanted
    • Homeland Security
    • U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) Most Wanted
    • U.S. Marshals Service Most Wanted
    • U.S. Secret Service Most Wanted Fugitives
    • U.S. Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC)

That’s data from almost 700 sources of criminal, sex offender, and eviction records with nearly 300 million criminal records.

Analyzing Tenant Background Checks

As a landlord, you should be concerned about violent crimes, assault, theft, trespassing, vandalism, arson, possession of an unauthorized weapon, etc. Examples of crimes that may not be as relevant are speeding tickets and underage alcohol consumption.

There are sometimes legal restrictions placed on individuals who have committed crimes. For instance, some sex offenders cannot come close to schools or parks. If your prospective tenant is a registered sex offender, you should find out if they are under court restrictions or probation and consider your property location in relation to nearby schools and parks.

Some landlords have their prospective tenant explain his or her criminal history. According to SmartMove’s poll in 2016 (shown below), 34% of landlords will overlook a relevant criminal history issue if the tenant has an explanation.

Keep in mind that as you assess potential tenants with a criminal background, you must have standardized screening criteria in place that you apply to all tenants. Learn more about how to evaluate a potential tenant’s criminal background check and avoid any legal trouble.

Why Should You Care About Tenant Background Checks

60% of landlords believe that background checks are more important than credit checks. After all, background checks are a safety measure, while credit reports are a measure of financial responsibility. However, both are important, and neither should be skipped when possible.

A solid screening process, which includes a tenant background check, is a critical part of being a successful landlord. To incur the lowest legal risk possible and have the fewest tenant-related issues, create a free Avail account now to start screening your tenants today. If you already have a prospective tenant and want to pull a background check, use our straightforward and easy-to-interpret criminal history reports.