REPOST: Your five-step guide to screening tenants

Finding the perfect tenant who wouldn't ruin the property, would always pay on time, or wouldn't give landlords any difficulty is a rigorous process. This Toronto Sun article provides a five-step guide to screening possible tenants.

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The quality of your property management experience, including your net return, relies heavily upon the kind of tenants you have as residents. This is why it’s crucial to do a thorough screening when selecting tenants for your best chance at a right fit for your space. Here’s my 5-step guide to screening tenants.

1. Evaluating first contact: Rental candidates will contact you by phone or email for more information and to set up viewings.  This initial contact is a great opportunity to pre-screen would-be tenants. If you’re chatting by phone take notes throughout the process. Ask things like:

How long are they looking to rent? If you’re interested in a short-term lease, but they’re looking for something longer-term, identifying this mismatch now saves you both a wasted showing.

• When do they need to move in?
• How many occupants will be moving in and what’s their relationship to each other?
• Do they have pets?

2. The viewing: When you’re showing the unit to prospective tenants, treat this as an in-person interview. Before the showing review your notes from your initial contact. You’ll be covering many of the same questions in a different context and want to ensure the answers you get don’t diverge.  Some red flags to be aware of:

• Was the candidate late for the scheduled showing?  This tardiness might extend throughout your relationship if they become your tenant.
• What was their general attitude like? Did they find reason to complain about the property or seem easily put-off or putout? Were these annoyances used to negotiate a price reduction?

3. The rental application: Common information to request includes personal information (full legal name, a piece of identification, current address, phone and email address, and date of birth), residential history (contact information for landlords and previous home addresses), employment history (status of employment, supervisor contact details, income), financial obligations (outstanding debt or ongoing obligations such as alimony), personal references, and emergency contact information. Be sure to receive a potential tenant’s express consent to commence the due diligence process including for credit and criminal reference checks.

4. Due Diligence: As best you can, authenticate the reference information provided and assess the feedback you’re hearing from references.  Do a little investigative work by looking up phone numbers to ensure they correspond to the names and organizations you’ve been given. 

When calling a landlord start the conversation with “I’m calling about your rental unit”. If a friend has offered to stand in as a landlord reference, this question tends to be enough to catch them off guard. Typical questions for landlords include whether rent was paid on time every month and about damage to the unit above expected wear and tear.

For work references, ask employers about the length of the candidate’s employment and if this job is expected to continue. Run a credit check using a company that provides a credit score, even if the candidate has provided their own. This report helps you understand the candidate’s big financial picture including obligations and payment habits, allowing you to gauge whether rent will be paid on time.

5. Go with your gut: The property management business is a nuanced field and this is where experience pays off. In the absence of experience, go with your instincts on a candidate. You’re about to embark on a long-term relationship with a valuable asset at stake. Be confident in your decision, as a vacant unit is preferable to a troublesome tenant.

And once you’ve found your dream tenant, do nurture the relationship!

Follow this Applegate Property Management Facebook page for more tips on handling properties and tenants.

REPOST: Tenant power: how to battle a bad landlord

 We've all seen bad landlords on TV shows and movies but only an unfortunate number have experienced bad landlords in real life. This article from The Guardian discusses some of the ways other people handle their not-so-nice landlords.

Protesters demonstrating before a Commons debate over the issuing of eviction notices to tenants who complain. | Image Source: theguardian.com

 
Dozens of private renters staged a demonstration outside parliament last Monday evening to put pressure on MPs to ban so-called “revenge evictions”. The demo came ahead of Friday’s House of Commons debate on proposals from Liberal Democrat MP Sarah Teather that are designed to stop landlords evicting tenants who complain about essential repairs or poor conditions.

There is growing evidence that an increasing number of renters are being forced to put up with properties that are damp, dangerous and badly in need of repair, but feel powerless to speak out, for fear that they will be thrown out and forced to find somewhere else to live, perhaps in another area.

Last week, Citizens Advice revealed that 20% more people sought help over eviction – despite being up-to-date with their rent – in the three months from July to September this year, compared with the same period last year. The charity also dealt with 14% more repairs and maintenance issues, and added that young people were more likely than older renters to have problems with private landlords.

There have been a number of cases in the news involving rogue landlords. Earlier this month it was reported that David Kohali was ordered to pay a total of £281,000 – thought to be a record penalty – for illegally renting out so-called “beds in sheds” in north London. And in August, another London landlord, Yaakov Marom, pleaded guilty to failing to comply with a council prohibition order to stop renting out a room that could only be accessed by crawling up a staircase on all fours.

By law, rented properties must be safe and fit to live in. The trouble is, many aren’t, due to a rogue minority of landlords ignoring their obligations. If you think your landlord is breaking the law or acting unfairly, what can you do?

A tenant’s first port of call should be the landlord or letting agent. Set out your concerns in writing and ask for them to be rectified within a reasonable amount of time. Check outTenant.Repair, a free service to help private renters in England fix maintenance problems themselves and report issues to their landlords.

If nothing happens, it may be time to think about calling in the local authority’s environmental health department. Under the Housing Act 2004, environmental health officers will use the “housing, health and safety rating system” (HHSRS) to check a property is safe. The HHSRS looks at 29 health and safety areas, and each hazard found is scored as either category 1 or 2 (category 1 is most serious). The most common hazards relate to damp and mould, excess cold, overcrowding, fire, lack of adequate heating, leaks, inadequate security, and risk of falling (for example on stairs).

The most basic action a council officer can take is to issue the landlord with a “hazard awareness notice” – but this doesn’t require any action to be taken. However, an “improvement notice” does. This will require the landlord to carry out repairs within a set period of time.

In serious cases, more severe courses of action open to the council include prohibition orders, which ban a property, or part of one, from being rented out, and demolition orders, which do as the name suggests. The council can also complete work itself and bill the landlord. In most cases the landlord is only at risk of prosecution if he or she ignores an improvement notice or other order – which is perhaps why some are happy to let unsafe properties. Even if a landlord fails to comply with a notice, the council will have to weigh up the chances of a prosecution. Once in court, any fine is set by the magistrate, with many appearing woefully inadequate.

“Under the Housing Act 2004 the maximum fine for a HHSRS notice is £5,000,” explains David Smith, housing solicitor at Anthony Gold Solicitors. “You might have seven hazards on one notice, but the maximum fine is still £5,000.”

In some cases local authorities go through expensive and time-consuming prosecutions, only for the magistrate to give the landlord no more than a slap on the wrist.

The Local Government Association, which represents local authorities, is highly critical of the process for prosecuting bad landlords. It cites one case where a landlord received a fine of £100, even though six tenants were left living in a property for a year without fire alarms or proper escape routes.

On top of any fine, landlords can also be hit with costs and a victim surcharge. However, costs awarded by the courts do not always meet the full costs incurred by the council. Alex Hilton, director of campaigning group Generation Rent, says this makes councils less willing to prosecute landlords.

“Because environmental health officers only recoup the notional costs of a prosecution when it is successful and not the cost of enforcement leading to the prosecution, councils see enforcement as a drain on resources,” he says. “This is because the fines go to the Treasury. In our Renters’ Manifesto we called for local authorities to keep the fines so that councils can see the value of investing in effective enforcement.”

Much bigger fines can be levied for other non-HHSRS offences. The Health and Safety Executive can prosecute landlords who break gas safety rules, and landlords can ultimately be jailed if their failure to maintain gas appliances leads to someone dying. Breaches of the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 can also incur big penalties.

When it comes to planning, the rules are slightly different, and the course of action the council will take depends on what planning regulation has been breached.

“For beds in sheds, a prohibition notice is likely to be issued straightaway, which would ban the shed from being used as a residential property – and this is usually followed up by a demolition order,” says the Association of Residential Letting Agents (Arla).

One group of landlords potentially subject to tougher rules and higher fines is that letting “houses in multiple occupation”. HMOs, let on a room-by-room basis, are lucrative for landlords, but it is a complex area of the private rented sector, and subject to a lot more rules than other property.

“Large” HMOs, rented to five or more people making up more than one “household” (ie a family or couple), and at least three storeys high, require a licence, while some councils will also licence “small” HMOs, too.

Most court cases which result in five-figure fines are for HMOs; landlords can be fined up to £20,000 just for not having a licence. If they have also committed “management offences” such as letting rooms that don’t meet the minimum size, they can be fined up to £5,000 per offence.

Some local authorities have introduced selective licensing, which means all landlords are required to hold a licence to rent out property. These schemes are normally introduced in areas with high levels of antisocial behaviour. The London borough of Newham introduced selective licensing covering all private rented properties in January 2013. Landlords letting property in the borough without a licence can be fined up to £20,000.

Learn more about the proper tenant-landlord relationship by following this Applegate Property Management Twitter account.

Avoiding common mistakes in property management

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Managing a property and a tenant relationship may be a fairly straightforward matter for some property owners. Some may take cues from their time as renters and copy a few methods that they liked while observing landlords and implement solutions to those they disliked. It doesn’t always turn out well as there are some areas where many landlords are prone to make errors.

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First among these is that many property owners tend to forget treating the management of the property as a business. As a result, some may see the necessary paperwork as a hassle and would prefer just verbal agreements with tenants. Without written documentation, it will be hard to resolve disputes so it is better to plan ahead and make sure that the stipulations for property use are properly recorded. Issuing receipts, meanwhile, is useful for tax records and making sure that all payments are up to date.

Another mistake that landlords tend to make is accessing the property without consent from the tenant. While they own the property, they must never forget that they agreed to rent it out to someone else. So, for the duration of the contract, landlords must remember to always respect the tenant’s privacy and that they have to gain permission to enter and inspect the property.

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Finally, landlords must make it a point to give out their contact information to their tenants. This is to make tenants feel secure in knowing that the property owner is available to deal with any problems with the property that may arise. It is understandable that some property owners may also be juggling managing their property with their work so it may be better for them to rely on a property management services provider.

For more information about property management, visit this Applegate Inc. Facebook page.