Property Management Agreement (image: c-rem.com)
Are you managing your own rentals homes in San Jose, Campbell, Los Gatos, and Saratoga? Do you dislike collecting their private information for background checks?
Well, you are not alone since collecting private information from strangers is a dicey proposition these days since you could be hit with complaints about identity theft.
Good news is that a Cloud Computing company called Cozy has eliminated the most painful part of tenant screening. Below are advantage of using Cozy for your tenant screening:
Eliminate Scam: Rental scams are common in every market with scammers claiming to represent the owners and collecting applications fees without even showing the property. With online applications you are not accepting payments in person, this should provide consumer with confidence that you are not trying to scam them and the property is indeed available for rent. You can develop a process where the applicant apply online after you have shown them the property.
Online applications: Your applicants will enter their application online which can be used to generate a background check on them. Processing paper applications is insane any more specially when each property generates more than 20 applications. Another advantage of online application is that you are not responsible for the privacy protection and security of the private information disclosed by the tenants.
Background Checks: Cozy can screen your tenants where all the information about each applicant is in one place as opposed to dozen emails. The Cozy background checks identifies the previous landlords for you that you can contact to complete your due diligence and selection process.
Online rent collection: Another painful part of managing your own properties is rent collection. Using Cozy is the online payment feature which is an option that your tenants can participate. The challenge with this option is that your tenant will have to input their bank account information into Cozy. Some of our tenants are not eager to furnish such information and we can not force them. But when the tenants use such a feature, it’s wonderful since it provides predictability into your rent collection and takes the US Postal Service out of the mix as well.
We believe Cozy offers a neat solution to help small landlords avoid these challenges at a very reasonable cost.