The rush of renters flooding markets from coast to coast has real estate professionals scrambling to keep their buyers, sellers, managers and renters happy.
But for Mike Cutchin—a partner in an apartment ownership group and property manager in the San Francisco Bay area—and Amy Sampl, a licensed REALTOR® who exclusively handles property management in the St. Cloud, Minn., area, online tenant screening service Houserie has taken the work out of chasing down references, and conducting credit, eviction and criminal background checks on prospective rental clients.
“Before Houserie, I would email applications to prospective tenants and once I heard back, I’d forward them to a third-party screening group,” says Cutchin. “It was so much more of a hassle, even though I have managers working with me. And when working with start-up properties, we wanted to qualify the best tenants, so I’d end up screening them myself.”
Working for a broker who is thinking of establishing a local property management office that Sampl herself would manage, Sampl echoes Cutchin’s frustration with the tenant screening process when she thinks about the drudgery of background checks before she handed them over exclusively to Houserie. Currently, Sampl’s ALS Venture Group LLC owns 19 properties, 17 of which are rented, with two being remodeled for occupancy this coming summer.
Both Cutchin and Sampl discovered that Houserie identity checks provide an inexpensive way to ensure prospective tenants are who they say they are. With Houserie, managers, agents and owners can check death records for fraudulent SSN use and access a full address history for any individual.
In addition, Houserie can screen court records nationwide for past eviction cases matching a potential renter’s name, a predictor of the likelihood that the tenant will default on a lease.
Cutchin and Sampl also make frequent use of Houserie’s credit check service, which provides a secure way for tenants to share credit data so real estate professionals can make leasing decisions without having direct access to specific accounts, banking details and the tenant’s SSN.
“Houserie is nice because it keeps me out of the loop on money transactions,” says Cutchin. “The tenants pay Houserie directly to get their application vetted, providing a turnkey process for the application/fee transaction.”
Sampl offers high praise for Houserie’s tenant criminal background check, which instantly retrieves data from over a billion criminal records and sex offender databases nationwide.
“We have a strict no criminal and drugs policy for the safety of our tenants, and we’re very careful about it,” says Sampl. “We charge an application fee to run the Houserie report and the tenant knows we’re doing it.”
“I find Houserie to be both simple and easy to understand,” says Cutchin, who has been using the program for a few months now.
“I haven’t looked at any other company since I started using Houserie,” says Sampl, “it’s the best. We always do the most thorough reporting, and their reports are well worth the money.”
For more information, visit www.houserie.com.
