Tenant Screening for Landlords, Owners and Managers - Page 7 of 14

Guide to Choosing the Best Tenant Screening Service 2017 (Part 2)

In my last post, Guide to Choosing the Best Tenant Screening Service 2017 (Part 1) I wrote about “what makes TenantMagic better than the rest of the tenant screening companies out there?” That post looked at the importance of having comprehensive screenings to make a qualified decision when considering rental applicants.

In this post I want to look at the other end of the spectrum, screening reports that have volumes of data and analytics.

A business acquaintance of mine has a real estate agent service platform and recently contacted me regarding a competitor that offers a similar application and screening program. They approached him to explore potential partnering opportunities. My acquaintance asked me what I thought of the company.

Their web site had a good clean design and did a nice job of presenting their program. The 5-minute video on the home page spent a lot of time talking about using artificial intelligence for their reporting analytics.

I then looked at their sample reports and was overwhelmed by the number of analytics and charts. A lot of the data was nice to know but really did not add much to the overall decision making process. From my perspective, it would lead to analysis paralysis. Here is a good article that describes analysis paralysis in decision making. https://personalexcellence.co/blog/analysis-paralysis/

I base this observation on the calls I receive from both agents and landlords users of TenantMagic. We have made every effort to make our reports as easy to read and review as possible. Over the years we have made changes from the input we have received from our users. In spite of all of these efforts we do get users that need assistance. We do provide written instructions and have short explainer videos but some still need to be walked through the process the first time.

TenantMagic users want both comprehensive information and the ability to quickly evaluate it. We work very hard to maintain that balance to make sure agents and owners select TenantMagic when choosing the best tenant screening service. After all they are using our service to save time and overwhelming them with data is counterproductive.

When choosing the best tenant screening service, agents and landlords need to consider how well the tenant screening provider understands their information and time requirements. TenantMagic understands those requirements by listening to our users.

Guide to Choosing the Best Tenant Screening Services 2017 (Part 1)

One question we frequently get at TenantMagic is “what makes TenantMagic better than the rest of the tenant screening companies out there?” With so many different tenant screening companies, we understand that looking for the best screening service might be difficult. For that reason, we decided to give you our guide on choosing the best tenant screening companies. Today’s post we will look at the importance of comprehensive screenings.

Comprehensive screenings

One important aspect of tenant screening is gathering all relevant information about the tenant. I have spoken to many landlords and agents that use a credit report to qualify a tenant and sometimes they accept a credit report provided by the applicant.

There are 2 reasons why this is bad.

Credit reports give you part of the picture. Eviction reports and criminal reports ore very important to properly evaluate a potential tenant.
As I have written in a previous post, fake credit reports can be purchased on-line. Here is a site that blatantly promotes them. https://fake-credit-score.pdffiller.com/

Many services offer combinations of credit reports, criminal reports, and eviction reports, and others offer credit and criminal reports, with eviction reports as an additional add-on cost. TenantMagic includes eviction reports in the screening report giving owners and agent comprehensive information to make a highly informed decision.

TenantMagic goes one step further after the owner or agent receives the reports. There are instances when the criminal received from the courts require further explanation. TenantMagic will conduct additional research on criminal reports if further clarification is required.

Additionally, eviction courts do not use social security numbers. This can result in false positives with common names. The TenantMagic program resolves false positives by comparing addresses where the applicant was known to live as reported by the credit bureaus with the addresses where a person with that name was evicted. If there is a match, then we know it was the applicant that was evicted.

In future posts regarding Choosing the Best Tenant Screening Services, I will discuss customer service and ease of use for both the owner/agent and the applicant.

How Great Customer Service Impacts Your Business

In my last 2 posts I wrote about the importance of customer service for tenant screening providers and how TenantMagic uses customer service to create a competitive advantage.

Since that post we noticed a spike in registrations that still continues. I originally attributed it to our blogs and marketing efforts. This was only was only partially correct.

Fortunately, a number of the new registrants called in for additional information. They were from all over the country and I asked them how they heard about TenantMagic. Most of them told me that they heard of us from recommendations on Trulia’s www.trulia.com website forum discussing the “Best website to use for tenant screening.”

Below are 2 comments that mention TenantMagic’s customer service.

“TenantMagic. TenantMagic. Easiest, simplest, most effective way to screen my applicants. I’ve been doing rentals for 28 years and I have never had an easier and better way to screen than TenantMagic. If you are ever looking for a tenant screening service that is free to the user, that is easy with immediate results, that provides everything you would want like criminal, eviction, credit, sex offender, etc, then switch to TenantMagic.
http://www.tenantmagic.net is the best I’ve come across. I spoke immediately with the owner who assisted me and my applicants right away.
No cost. Simple to use. Better than e-renter, cozy, my rental, etc. 10/10.”

“Rentprep is a very good service, but I actually was not satisfied with how much time it took to get my application. They say that it is because they are doing the applications by hand and reviewing them, which I believe.
But I switched to a company called TenantMagic http://www.tenantmagic.net and have received the same application review services checking for any mistakes, false positives, etc, and found that it is much cheaper than rent prep, and much better. I spoke with owner right away, he was very helpful. I agree with above comments that tenant background is terrible, and my rental is also not a great service. I’ve tried 3-4 services and nothing compared to customer service and speed of TenantMagic.”

You can check out the actual comments and thread at – https://www.trulia.com/voices/Property_QandA/Best_website_to_use_for_tenant_screening_-641199

It is really satisfying to implement a strategy and see how it directly impacts your business. One of my favorite sayings is “ It is simple but not easy.” And that surely applies to establishing a customer service strategy that works.