If you’re curious about how to find good tenants, you’re on your way to preventing one of the biggest headaches a landlord can experience: tenant eviction.
Rhode Island is in the middle of an eviction crisis. In 2016, there were 5,069 evictions in the state, 1,580 of which were in the city of Providence—nearly triple Boston’s eviction rate. That being said, it’s particularly understandable that you to want to learn how to find good tenants if you’re a Rhode Island landlord.
Regardless of where your rental properties are located, eviction is a serious problem with enormous costs, both financial and emotional.
The images eviction brings to mind are moving: furniture left on the curbside in the rain; families trying to cram a houseful of possessions into a hotel room; young people living in cars, with no place to shower. It’s obviously worse to be the one with your furniture on the curbside, but nobody wants to be the landlord in that situation, either.
It’s enough to keep you up all night Googling how to find good tenants for your rental property.
Having to deal with courts and law enforcement officials wasn’t part of your dream when you decided to go into the real estate business. You had hoped for good relationships with your tenants. You might even be fielding calls from the bank about the mortgage on your rental property.
It’s a disaster for everyone involved.
Thankfully, technology has become the “how” in “how to find good tenants” for your rental real estate so that you never need to deal with the tenant eviction process.
How to Find Good Tenants with NowRenting
At NowRenting, we offer online software for landlords that helps you find good tenants & manage rental properties efficiently.
While we can’t help you out if you already have a tenant who’s in serious trouble due to eviction, there are places they can go for help and steps you can take to avoid bad tenants in the future.
We have created a few tools to help you avoid getting into that situation in the first place, we’d like to start by highlighting our free tenant Background Checks feature.
Find Good Tenants via Background Checks
The basis of how to find good tenants is to consistently perform full tenant background checks, no matter the circumstance.
After all, evictions don’t happen for no reason: something went wrong. Your tenant may have lost their job, be having family problems, or have run into unexpected financial or legal trouble. It could be something totally out of the blue, something nobody could have anticipated…Or not.
Maybe this is something that’s already happened once before.
One of the hardest aspects of an eviction is the possibility of making unpleasant discoveries about the past history of your tenant, who you trusted. We think that the best way to protect yourself is to do what you can to make those discoveries beforehand by finding rental tenants with good financial history and a lack of criminal activity.
Or it may not be the result of a serious crisis—sometimes, for whatever reason, a tenant might commit to a rent that’s just too much for them to handle in their current financial situation. You don’t want to put somebody into a unit that they just can’t afford.
That’s why we’ve partnered with TransUnion, one of the three major US credit reporting agencies, to bring our customers access to safe, trustworthy and thorough background checks.
Our tenant background reports include a full credit report, eviction history report and criminal background check, and you have the option of passing the cost on to the applicant.
If you’re asking yourself how to find good tenants that will pay for the cost of their background check, we have news: the best tenants are the ones who actually will. So if you do choose to pass the cost on to the applicant, you’re more likely to weed out the applicants who aren’t committed or perhaps aren’t financially stable.
How NowRenting Background Checks Work
Now that you know that the foundation of how to find good tenants is to use complete background checks, it’s time to learn how to get a full tenant background check with NowRenting.
Once you’ve made contact with a prospective tenant through NowRenting’s system, you’ll be able to access a menu of options for them in the Leads section of the site. Navigate to Screening > Send Application and click the Request Background Report button to start the background check process. 
We’ll take you through a short series of questions which will verify your identity with TransUnion, then send the applicant an email asking their permission to perform the background check, and guiding them through a similar identity verification process. For safety, the personal identification information of both landlord and applicant is not retained by our system.
After TransUnion performs the background check, you can view it on the applicant’s Leads page under Screening > Review Lead > View Full Report, or by navigating to nowrenting.com/applicants, which will display a list of all the Leads you’ve requested background checks for.
You’ll be able to see the applicant’s credit score, as well as any criminal history or records of past evictions they may have. TransUnion’s background checks are thorough; you can trust that a clean background check from TransUnion is an accurate representation of the applicant’s past history. This is the critical information that helps you determine how to find good tenants for your rental property.
For more information, see our Help Center articles on How to Send a Background Check and How to View a Background Check.
Protect Yourself from Tenant Eviction Disaster
The Background Check feature is included in the free NowRenting account, giving landlords access to this powerful functionality at no charge to them.
Also available is the NowRenting Solo membership (at $90 / year) which provides access to background checks as well as a full suite of tools that includes automatic lead screening, listing syndication to our network of partners, a custom website for your properties, a private local phone number and email address for communicating with leads, and more.
(Note: As of December 2018, NowRenting’s pricing structure has changed. Visit the pricing page for current information.)
You’ve now learned the most important factor of how to find good tenants for your properties! You have nothing to lose and can have peace of mind about your next tenant to gain.