Tenant Check - Is This Legal?
I was talking with some other landlords in my area and the discussion of developing a centralized listing of tenants who skipped out on paying rent that we could reference. Instead of relying on their rental history we would cooperatively work together to keep the list up and keep the bad tenants out. The question arose whether this was even legal. Has anyone tried this or have opinions on its legality?
Depending on state law, for examply in FL it is illegal to maintain a "blacklist" of tenants. Check with your state law. [ Edited by roboxking on Date 10/12/2004 ]
Surely there must be a service that will search county records in your state for evictions. I pay a service to have a credit report, FL evictions, and FL criminal records.
From a procedural point of view, your idea is doomed to fail because of the labor involved and the low cost benefit return.
You can do most of the work with the rental application. I deny over 60% of applicants for falsifying information on their appliation. It is always the rental history.
For the rental history section of the applicaiton
1) do a reverse phone number lookup on the tenants phone numbers, on the land lord phone numbers, and the phone numbers that the tenants have called you from. match the phone numbers to the addresses given.
2) look up the property addresses in the county records. make sure that you are actually calling the owner of the property and not a friend.
3) i get a xerox copy of a driver's liscense as part of my rental applicaiton. I look at the address and issue date and verify that it is on the application. If not, I call the owner of the address and get a rental reference anyway.
4) look at previous reported addresses on the credit report and match them to the application
5) i ask the landlords very pointed questions to find out if they really are the owner or the landlord. "so, they pay you $500 a month, right", the application says $700. "So they have lived there 4 years, right", the application says 1 year etc. Every landlord in the world knows what the rent is and about how long they have been tenants.
5) I also ask on my applicaiton if they have ever been evicted, plantiff in a lawsuit, etc. Then my lease says that falsifying information on the applicaiton is a violation of the lease.
6) some landlords ask on the application "how many times have you been evicted" to make it sound like once is OK. I do not do this.
7) in one case where I was not sure, I asked the tenant for cancelled checks to show that she was paying rent.
Brenda
Best thing a smart LL can do is join his local Rental A**ociation, as they specialize in educating their members as to what they can, can't do legally.
There are LL Groups in FL just like most other states so find & participate.