NYC Tenant Screening Guide For Landlords

Selecting the ideal tenant is a crucial choice for any landlord. Finding a suitable property and obtaining good mortgage rates are both important for your success, but if you rent your apartment to a tenant who will eventually be evicted, all of your hard work will be for nothing. In the end, you want a tenant you can rely on to look after your house and pay the rent on time. This is more difficult to do than it may seem, especially since most candidates prefer to perform at their peak just during the screening phase.

Here are some concrete steps you may take to ensure a successful, error-proof tenant screening procedure.

Make Sure to Pre-Screen Your Tenants
Simply pre-screening your potential tenants can save you a lot of time. Why invite folks who don’t even fit your requirements, after all? The information about your property and the kinds of tenants who are interested in the unit should both be included in a thorough listing that you generate. You need to take a number of things into account while creating your criteria, including the property’s location, advantages, refurbishment history, valuation, and more. You might want to stage the property if you want to draw in higher-earning individuals in order to do so.

Know The Type of Tenant You Want Before You Advertise
Of course, if you don’t even know who your ideal tenant should be, pre-screening tenants won’t be effective. As a result, it would be advisable to spend a few minutes outlining the qualities you seek in a potential tenant. While we all aspire to be wealthy, successful professionals who are too busy to even remain at home yet still manage to make their rent payments on time each and every time, it may be too idealistic. With such requirements, you might have few or no opportunities at all. Instead, think about your assets and determine who will profit from them the most.
Here are some factors you might want to think about:

1. Earnings
   The most obvious but unquestionably most significant factor is this. You do not want to find yourself having to go after clients for past-due payments. What, however, constitutes a favorable income to rent ratio? A good generalization would be to look for tenants whose salaries are three times higher than the monthly rent.

However, because not all properties are created equal, the rule is not infallible. You must consider the lifestyle that comes with living in an expensive neighborhood if your rental property is there. You might need to raise the ratio in this situation to 3.5 times or higher. On the other hand, you could want to think about dropping your ratio to 2.8 times or lower if your home is situated in a neighborhood that is experiencing financial difficulty in order to allow more applications.

Avoid Things That May Cause Trouble in The Future

Asking the incorrect questions, particularly ones that may be offensive, may have legal repercussions. The Human Rights Acts address difficult topics such as “do you plan to have more children” and “are you married.” Tenant screening on the basis of race, religion, ancestry, nationality, gender, marital status, handicap, age, and other factors is prohibited.

A privacy violation also occurs when credit information on a tenant is obtained unlawfully. In severe circumstances, you can even end up in jail. The same rules apply for obtaining a tenant’s social security number (SIN).

Conclusion
Tenant screening doesn’t have to be a difficult procedure. In order to assist them in finding the ideal renters for their New York City properties. Landlord Management works directly with landlords and property owners.

Get in touch with one of our representatives at LLM to schedule a consultation with us to see how we can help.