Tenant Referencing - Who Do You Use?

Murphybear

Richard1212 said:

lika_86 said:

Richard1212 said:

Although I use a management company and credit rating agency investigations are always necessary, I DO tell my agents to obtain references ; and they are 1. previous landlord  ;  2. the prospective tenants' bank ( permission is needed  for that) and  3.the prospective tenant's employer or employers over the past 5 years. 

Sounds like overkill. 

If you knew the problems that choosing risky tenants can cause, you would go for overkill I can assure you.

Sadly getting the best references under the sun doesn’t guarantee a good tenant.  Some things are beyond your control such as the tenant losing their job.  This can be a nightmare as if the tenant is going to claim housing benefit and doesn’t have a lot of savings the landlord may have to wait a while for the rent.  

lookstraightahead

Mstty said:

lookstraightahead said:

Mstty said:

Richard1212 said:

lika_86 said:

Richard1212 said:

Although I use a management company and credit rating agency investigations are always necessary, I DO tell my agents to obtain references ; and they are 1. previous landlord  ;  2. the prospective tenants' bank ( permission is needed  for that) and  3.the prospective tenant's employer or employers over the past 5 years. 

Sounds like overkill. 

If you knew the problems that choosing risky tenants can cause, you would go for overkill I can assure you.

And in this market you can be as picky as you like.

Of course if someone doesn't want to provide the information they can just look at a different property to rent.

We may be going down a similar road. Where by in the past word of mouth and a quick check we will make the application more formal.

What you don't want to do though is shoot your self in the foot using outdated criteria. I rented because I moved so my job was new, for example. Picky needs to be the right kind of pickiness. 

In your particular instance you probably wouldn't be picked under what we are considering and discussing moving forwards.

We also consider local people first in our approach. That has always been the case though as we always wanted to house local people. Even refusing the bribes of London Boroughs to offload their tenants they could not house.

Interesting times ahead, without advertising we may have a property becoming free in about 10 weeks and already have 22 applicants by word of mouth.

Fair enough I never had a problem renting out of area, and I would always go through an agent anyway so you wouldn't need to consider picking me.

Admittedly I was a landlord but it was a long time ago, and my tenants were all great, that was before the days of any real checks at all - guess I was lucky 😁