How to find great families for your Los Gatos Rentals!

Happy Silicon Valley tenants (source: flagship-pm.com)

Before we are comfortable to hand the keys to someone as tenants to our client’s homes, we do extensive background checks. We investigate top 6 questions to find best tenants for your Los Gatos Rental. We rarely make exceptions on these condition on our own properties so we see no reason why you should not expect them from your Property Management company as well.

1) Credit Check : We require an extensive Credit History using all 3 major credit agencies including TransUnion, Equifax and Experian. As a property managers we are making the same decisions on the credit worthiness of an applicant than an underwriter would about a mortgage applicant. We want to make certain that the tenants we select for our clients honor their obligations.

2) Income Check: Depending on the monthly payment, you would want to ask about the income potential of your tenants since you don’t want the applicants to be spending more than 40% of their gross monthly income on housing. Make sure you are considering the cost of utilities and other charges that will not be included in rent. Part of the rational in conducting income check is that we want to make certain that the Rent our clients are expecting to receive will not exceed more than 40% the applicants monthly net income.

3) Employment Check: The longer the person has stayed in a position might be a good sign of the job stability, but this is very subjective in this day and age since most employers have At-Will contracts with their employees.

4) Landlord References: This is one of the most critical pieces that we use in determining the instability of a tenant for our clients. During this difficult foreclosure crises when some long term homeowners have lost their homes, they are having a tough time providing rental references since they have been homeowners for a long time. In some cases we even go back to the time this applicant might have rented a property during their college years to get these references.

5) Eviction Filings: This is the most alarming information about a tenants history. If there is history of eviction filing in your tenants’ background, this means that a previous property owner or property manager had to resort to an eviction to vacate the property.

6) Bank or Check Writing History: Would you want to know if your tenant has written bad checks before!? If there are irregular bank transactions in your tenants background it might be a good idea to keep interviewing
more tenants.

Bottom line is that the more energy, time and dedication you allocate to screening your tenants pays off in the long run since you will have reliable, dedicated and hassle-free rental properties for years to come.
Finally, we have very qualified and wonderful families who are looking for good homes in Los Gatos and Saratoga to rent long-term.

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