While it’s difficult to find great tenants, it’s not impossible. All terrific tenants possess certain qualities in their personality and background that can be found when a landlord does the right kind of interviewing and screening. If you want a good tenant, you can’t rent to the first person who responds to your advertisement. It doesn’t matter if you absolutely have to fill the unit. You’ll regret a hasty decision, and you could end up spending 6 months trying to get rid of a bad tenant.
Ability to Pay
One of the first things you should be looking at is the tenant’s ability to pay. You don’t want a tenant that can only hold it together for a few months before they become late with the rent and finally stop paying completely. When checking the rent against their income, the rent shouldn’t be more than 30 percent of their total income for the month. That should be one of the basic criteria of each rental. While it can’t guarantee that the tenant isn’t living beyond his means, it’s a good indication of whether they’ll stay current on rent.
Clean and Tidy
As a landlord, the cleanliness of your tenants is a huge indication of whether they’ll take care of the property. You can often judge this by checking their appearance when they are looking at the property. You might even check the interior of the car to see how it’s maintained. While you might not be able to deny them the apartment based solely on their appearance since that’s a violation, you can certainly pick another tenant over the messy one if you wish. You might blame the rejection on another factor. If you decide to rent to this person in spite of their messiness, you can include a cleaning clause in your lease agreement that gives you the chance to evict based on cleanliness.
Creditworthy
This means that the tenant has a good credit score. A good credit score says more about the potential tenant than whether they’re likely to pay the rent. It indicates their responsible payment habits and whether she overextends herself financially with car payments, credit cards and loans. When it comes to a tenant screening, you should consider the likelihood that they have renter’s insurance. You might even require this to be part of their rental agreement to ensure that you’re protected in case of a disaster in their unit.
Honest and Reliable
An honest, reliable tenant will not only pay the rent, he or she will also take care of the property and be free of drama. When you call for references, check their credit and screen them for other criteria, you’ll find that all the screenings come back exactly like they said. Honest tenants that are reliable are great tenants to have. They’ll be easy to deal with and not require extra time, energy or money for problems. The best kind of tenants won’t bother a landlord for trivial repairs or issues either. They’re the kind of tenant who will do it themselves because they take pride in their surroundings.
All of these qualities are ones that golden tenants possess. They’re the ones who are a perfect fit for your property. They aren’t rare, but they are definitely hard to find. You’ll have to spend the time and resources to weed through unsuitable applicants to find the ones who have these golden qualities. If you rush through the process and don’t screen your applicants, you could spend months with a terrible tenant who will cost you thousands of dollars and missed time at work while you take them to court to remove them from your property. Take the time to find the right tenant.
You must be logged in to post a comment.