Marchant Property Management Blog

Hi, Hunter and Brittany here again with Ten Questions to Ask Your Property Manager before Hiring Them. One of the very most important things obviously is finding a great tenant for your property. Every property manager should have a plan in place to obtain the best tenants for you and your property. So Hunter how does the application process work for finding a tenant with Marchant Property Management? Well first of all you're exactly right, the most important part of property is picking the right tenant. Let me tell you there's some bad people out there that know how to scam and scam their way into properties from owners that don't know how to do this, how to screen prospects. The first thing we do is we wanna make sure we wanna know who's gonna be there. We make sure everyone that's 18 years and older that they go through our full application process, so we're gonna screen each one of them individually so you kind of know everybody that's gonna be there. Secondly, we wanna make sure they can pay for the property or pay the rent. We make sure that their income is at least three times the monthly rent, and then third we're gonna do a very extensive background check on prospects. What would the extensive background check include? Well it's actually a lot of stuff. We're gonna check their credit for sure, we're gonna check their criminal history. We're gonna check the sex offender registry. We're certainly gonna check to make sure they've never been evicted before. Then also we're gonna do some rental verifications, which honestly is the most important thing about checking a tenant out. We're gonna talk to all their previous landlords, and we're gonna see what kind of tenant they've been. We wanna see how they've paid, we wanna make sure they're taking care of the property. We certainly don't wanna rent to anyone that's left a property damaged or destroyed, that's owed a landlord a balance of any kind or certainly not evicted either. Okay, and what about when someone's bringing a cat along with them? How do you go about making sure that this pet should even live at the property? Well that's a great question because first and foremost I'll tell you that 70% of potential applicants have a pet of some kind. So if you don't allow pets you can eliminate 70% potential applicants, so that's kind of a staggering statistic these days. Most of our owners do accept pets, and what's really cool is we've come up with this new program. We didn't come up with the program, but we're using a program it's called Pet Screening. Where it's actually like an application for the pet, so they put the pet through ringer. They verify all the vet records, to make sure all the shots are up to date. They do kind of like a background check on a pet. You need to make sure there's not been any bites or anything in the past. So that is a really cool feature that kind of gives our owners and us peace of mind that we're not getting Cujo in there. Just to elaborate on that a little bit is we don't rent to any pets that are the dangerous breeds list. Some of those would include Pitbulls, Rottweilers, German Shepherds, Dobermans, and I think there's about 10 or 12 of those that we exclude from renting to. Just make sure whenever you're hiring a property manager that you find out their applications screening process and just some important things that we do are pre qualifying the tenant. Doing an extensive background check and making sure that their animal can live there as well. A kind of application on the animal too.