Part of your job as a managing agent includes sourcing and checking tenants for your landlord clients.  It’s so important to make sure that you thoroughly check out your tenant applications, before you make recommendations to your landlord about who to accept as a tenant.  Here are some of the items you should check before approving a tenant:

• Current rental references – we recommend you start here, as this reference will either encourage you to continue reference checking, or discard the tenancy application altogether if the reference is really poor.
• Previous rental references – this is useful to check, to see if there is consistency in the tenant’s rental history. Have they always been good, reliable tenants, or is this a recent improvement?
• Employment and/or income – you need to make sure that the income your tenant is claiming to earn is accurate and that their income (or business, if they’re self-employed) is secure and reliable going forward. We suggested that you do a Google search for the employer and phone them on the publicly listed phone number, rather than any mobile number given to you by the tenant on the application.  This ensures that you speak with the actual business and not one of the tenant’s “friends”
• Tenancy databases – even though tenant default databases aren’t always reliable and up to date, we suggest you perform a search here anyway. It provides your office with some protection and proof that you’ve fully checked out this tenant.
• Personal referees – these referees aren’t always reliable and are usually pretty biased. But sometimes, these people can be really useful to talk to, especially if you are able to get to a casual conversation happening with this referee.  Occasionally, something candid and useful will slip out during this conversation, so it can be a useful phone call to make.

Our Rent Roll Starter Program includes an Application Processing Checklist to make sure you don’t forget any part of this process.  For more information about accessing this checklist or on starting your own Rent Roll, contact us today on phone 02 7903 9993