Looking for the best tenant screening tool online? You’ve probably come across many web pages that all promise to be the best service for screening tenants.
Many of those platforms will claim to help you find the best tenants merely by allowing you to enter an applicant’s information and receive a full tenant background report. However, the best tenant screening tool online won’t only give you a background report, it will also help you filter out poor-quality tenant leads based on some of your own pre-determined criteria.
After all, why settle for a tenant just because they don’t have a criminal record, no previous evictions and decent credit? These are not the best indicators of a tenant who won’t cause you headache down the road.
Just like in any job interview, there are questions you can ask a tenant upon applying to your rental that will help you to weed out problematic tenants—even if their background check looks good.
You have standards, so the best online tenant screening tool that you could use will have standards, too. Thankfully, you longer need to rely solely on standard tenant background checks to determine who qualifies as a good tenant candidate for your rental property.
NowRenting is the best tenant screening tool online for landlords and rental professionals because it helps you screen tenants not only based on their criminal history, rental background and credit, but also on additional criteria.
For example, if owning a large dog makes a tenant less than ideal for your rental, we’ll rate them as a less-than-perfect match.
Our system will rate your prospective tenants for you based on a match percentage and will let you know what impacted their score.
Continue reading to learn more about NowRenting and how our software empowers you to choose the best prospective tenants for your rental properties while saving you time.
How the Best Tenant Screening Tool Online Works
Here’s how the best tenant screening tool online works to help you find the best tenants possible for your rental:
1. Create a rental listing with NowRenting
In order screen tenants using NowRenting, you need to sign up for a NowRenting account. This will allow you to post your rental listing to multiple websites at the same time to get unlimited tenant leads.
2. Write your tenant screening questions
Navigate to ‘Listings’ and begin the property listing process. Then, you’ll come to the ‘Screening’ step which allows you to enter questions your tenant leads are required to answer when they express interest in your property.
These questions are what will help us determine the quality of the matches so that you can stay organized, only inviting great tenants to apply for your rental along with a background check.
Some examples of questions that might be helpful to you as a landlord are as follows:
- What kind of pets do you have?
- Do you smoke?
- Are you willing to supply references?
This is just one of multiple features that make NowRenting stand out as the best tenant screening tool or service that you can possibly use.
You will then be able to assign the answer options, as well as assign ratings to specific answers. For example, if someone answers they aren’t currently gainfully employed, you can assign the answer ‘no’ a ‘substandard rating.’ If they answer ‘no’ it will lower their lead score, making them a substandard tenant.
3. Screen your tenant leads
When potential leads enter your NowRenting dashboard, you can see what their match percentage is, which tells you at quick glance how good of a prospective tenant they are based on your screening questions. You can also see the status of the lead and indicate where you are at with that tenant lead. This is another feature that makes NowRenting the best tenant screening tool on the market.
You can even click on an individual lead to see what impacted their match percentage. In the example below, the tenant received a 58% match score because his answer to the question about Pets most significantly reduced his score.
He answered that he had a ‘large dog,’ and the landlord in this example had originally associated ‘large dog’ with a very low rating.
A tenant with a large dog was a big red flag for this landlord and this specific property. However, this tenant answered that he has multiple references to supply to the landlord, as well as being currently gainfully employed. So these favorable answers helped increase his score, but not enough to make him the perfect tenant. Hence the 58% match percentage.
And if the landlord wanted to filter the leads in his or her view, this is possible when the user selects the ‘Show Filters’ button as shown in the image displayed prior to the one you see above. Once that’s clicked, NowRenting displays filter options. Filtering by listing, minimum match, screening and status is possible.
4. Send a background check & application
Once you find a tenant you’d like to apply to your listing, you can send a background check request and the application. When you send a background check request, you have the option to require that your tenant pays the fee for that. This keeps your background checks free of cost to you as the landlord.
5. Generate and sign a lease electronically
If everything checks out well, you can use our lease generator which will auto-fill the lease with tenant-specific information. You can edit the standard lease agreement form as you see fit.
NowRenting also facilitates online signatures for both you and your potential tenant so that you don’t need to deal with paper or any other third-party tool for signing leases online.
NowRenting is More than Just the Best Online Tenant Screening Tool
NowRenting isn’t just the best tenant screening tool online due to intelligent tenant matching—it also helps to streamline all your other rental management tasks. When you sign up for NowRenting at an affordable $9 per month, you can achieve the following, plus more!
(Note: As of December 2018, NowRenting’s pricing structure has changed. Visit the pricing page for current information.)
- Post property listings to multiple sites
- Get free tenant background checks
- Generate and sign leases electronically
- Centralize your tenant correspondence
- Collect tenant rent online
Choose a NowRenting plan today and get better tenants into your rental, once and for all.