10/06/2022
Tenant Selection and Tenant Screening!
If you have been in the rental business for any length of time then you have come to know just how important tenant selection and tenant screening are to the process. You can literally fail or fall short on basically any other aspect of this business but get these two right and come out fine. However, this is a double-edged sword as you can also get every other aspect right and fail at these two and watch your dreams of that large portfolio fall by the wayside. It stands to reason if you intend on being successful in the real estate investing world and making you mark as a landlord then you must become adept and on top of your game at these two areas.
There are tons of services available to help you with the processes and many promote themselves as free tenant screening services or online tenant selection apps and so forth. All of these work the same way; They are free, To sign up but to actually search out a background you have to pay a staggering fee per search and what's more, they only record what is up to date via automated services. Many courthouses are backlogged for years updating information and some don't update information online at all so even after the staggering fee there is a possibility you are not getting the entire picture or in some cases any picture at all.
The Underground Landlord is the only service to date of it's kind and works on a completely different concept. First of all , Underground landlord is not based on filings at a particular government system nor searching a credit bureau. This site is 100% completely peer to peer updated and is up to the minute of the update. For a brief synopsis of how it works read on,.
First and foremost you sign up to http://www.undergroundlandlord.com and set up your profile and account. This is very important as this is how you will be contacted by other landlords on the site. Do not be alarmed your information is private and only those who would have enough information about a tenant you have placed in your database will be able to see you. Now that you are signed up, click Add Tenant at the top of your account page. You will be prompted to add as much information as you have concerning a tenant that has wronged you. Again do not worry here as NO ONE will ever see the information you place here. That is the beauty of the setup. Now that you are comfortable adding, keep going. Add as many as you like. That is another great feature here is we are not limited to only current problems. You can add as far back as you wish.
Now hypothetically, a landlord two counties away from you is also a member of the site. He or she just received an application from a prospective tenant to rent a recently remodeled condo. They have done their due diligence and found now issues with the prospective tenant. This happens to be the same tenant that not only left owing you 2k in back rent but also decided to break two windows and trash your single family home on his or her way out the door. Trust me this can happen and will happen if you are in this business much longer than a month and have at least 1 or more rental houses. Fortunately for the landlord 2 counties away you placed this tenant in your database and this landlord ran a search at The Underground Landlord. Did we show him the tenant or any info about the tenant? No we didn't . We did however show him you. That's right. Your name and contact info came up as having a tenant that seemingly matches their search in your database. At this point they could have contacted you but there was no need. As it turns out, since this site is also set up to operate retro, 3 other landlords had a tenant in their system that matched as well. As soon as the search returned 4 landlords who were not on the application but had a tenant matching quite a bit of criteria the landlord doing the search knew to immediately move on to the next potential tenant.
There are several things beautiful about this system. One, It's peer driven. We use one another to benefit one another. We save money from each others past mistakes and prevent headaches to ourselves in the future,. Is it foolproof? Of course not. Will we still get bad tenants. Of course we will but ask yourself, if the site saves you just one headache a year isn't it worth a small portion of time to use and operate the site. Of course it is. Now the next step is click one of the links above, sign up, and then share to every landlord you know both near you and across the globe. The more users who actively participate and use the website the better the site is for all of us.
Underground Landlord exists to help landlords communicate to one another more efficiently by putting them in contact with one another.
