10 Tips to Systemize Your Tenant Screening Process
  
Screening tenants is probably one of the most important topics for buy and hold investors who self-manage their portfolios. It really does not matter if you have 5 or 50 units. Screening tenants and choosing the best qualified tenants from the beginning is critically important to the long term success of your rental units and portfolio.
Being a landlord, if you don't learn this business, you just can't stay in this business. It is not fun when your tenant is teaching you the Landlord & Tenant rules.
Here are the top 10 tips to systematize your tenant screening process.
1. Have a strong and detailed rental application.
2. Call previous and current landlords. (Previous landlords are better) - ask them about late payments, if they would ever rent to them again, and if they were ever involved in any disagreements. Find out as much as you can.
3. Call to verify employment - A lender or bank will call the employer 100% of the time to verify income for a mortgage This is a best practice that you can take from the lending world.
4. Use a third party screening system that runs credit and criminal checks. Check out https://www.tenantverification.ca/
5. Once you accept a tenant, get the deposit or last month's rent immediately
6. Get emergency contact info on the Application - Go a step further and save it into your phone on the tenant's contact card. If it's an emergency, the last thing you want to do is dig through all of your papers in your filing cabinet looking for it.
7. Have a written rental standard form to avoid any discrimination issues if it arises.
8. If no previous landlord, ask for three references and call them
9. Have a scoring system based on written rental standards
10. Call the new tenant a week after move-in to check in with them
www.gov.bc.ca/landlordtenant
http://www.housing.gov.bc.ca/rtb/bc_laws/RTR.html http://www.tenantsbc.ca/
https://www.thelpa.com/free/landlord-law-british-columbia.pdf
http://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/housing-and-tenancy/residential-tenancies/forms/rtb1.pdf
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