Screening for tenants - Picking the right tenant

How do I pick the right tenant?

This is one of the most common questions/problems a new landlord faces, and for good reason. A bad tenant can make your life close to a living nightmare. The key in managing properties without much work is in picking the right tenant.

So, how do I pick the right tenant?

First you need to advertise your rental. Preferably one should use newspapers or even better online rental listings.

Newspapers can be very pricy and reach a rather limited target group.

Online rental listings are more efficient in attracting a larger audience. The bad thing is that you will be cutting everyone who is not computer literate.

Some landlords also put signs on the street. This is often a very time consuming way of advertising since you will be wasting A LOT of time answering questions and showing it to people who never send in their application.

By using online rental listings you can do all this initial screening via a very detailed rental listings and then via email. By doing so, you only show it to the people who passed your initial criteria.

Where to advertise?

Craigslist is a great website and free. The limitation in Craigslist is that you have to add your listings every single time it's vacant and there's practically no customer service and the site itself leaves a lot to be desired.

More professional sites offer the option of saving your apartment so that you don't have to enter your apartment information every time it's vacant, but most of these are not free.

Rentmore.ca offers free rental listings up to a certain quantity. As of this moment if you have less than 3 apartments you can use Rentmore.ca completely free. If you have more you have to pay a small amount. Using Rentmore.ca also gives you access to other great services that other sites do not provide.

Creating the rental listing

Put as much information as you can in the rental listing. This ensures that you do not have to waste time showing it to people who do not want it and also so that you do not have to answer the same questions over and over.

It will very often take several weeks if not a whole month picking a good tenant, so do not procrastinate! Put in your listing as soon as you can.

If you are in a rush, some web sites offer featured rental listings that give you greater exposure for a small price. If you are in a rush it's often worth the money. Rentmore.ca's featured rental listings can be paused so that you can use the remaining credits next time you have another vacancy. Most other sites do not offer this.

How do I make sure the tenant is good?

A recommended practice is to put 4-5 questions in your rental listing. Put in the listing that answering these questions is required.

Suggested questions:

Current employment, with position and salary.
Previous landlord references, and how long the tenant stayed there.
How long the tenant is planning on staying in the apartment.
Anything else that might be useful.

1 & 2 are by far the most important ones, but 2 & 3 can also provide you with knowledgeable answers.

Some tenants will have issues in replying to these questions, especially their salary requirement. The reason for this requirement is twofold:

You as a landlord need to ensure that the tenant can pay the rent...no matter what some say, IT IS your right to know this!
You will simply cut off the complainers. If someone complains, and doesn't want to give you this information you're almost guaranteed that they will complain, and cause other problems, to a way larger extent if you were to chose them as a tenant! So if you get one of those, just delete the email; they are simply not worth your time.

Always...always....always check up on references! This is incredibly important since you will run into the odd person who falsifies their references.

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