How to Successfully Screen Tenants

One of the biggest concerns we often hear from people that don’t own rental properties is that “they don’t want to deal with tenants”. They are worried about being “on call” or dealing with tenants that don’t pay rent or destroy the property. Yes, those are valid concerns but we feel there are many things you can do to mitigate those risks upfront if you have a very thorough screening process.

Over the years we have refined our tenant screening process – here is our 10 step process:

We have a website that outlines all our rental units.

This allows us to showcase the details of the property and include more pictures than what are typically allowed in online rental platforms. This also shows prospective tenants we are professional and good landlords. We typically post the ads on Facebook Marketplace & Kijiji, these two seem to give us the most leads in our markets.

In the rental ad we ask prospective tenants to complete a "unit viewing request form".

This form is pretty detailed, and we are able to get a lot of info about people up front. It is also a quick test to see if the applicant can follow instructions.

We use the data from the completed request forms to filter through who we will call for a phone interview.

You can easily use the spreadsheet from the form responses to now sort and track the phone calls you make. We have a standard list of questions ready and ask everyone the same thing.

If we think the applicant could be a good fit following the call we will book them in for a viewing.

We book everyone for a 15 minute slots in one afternoon.

During the viewing we make sure to ask questions in a certain way to get out as much information from them as we can (like how many cats do you have?).

We’re also going to assess how they present themselves, can they look us in the eye? What do they look at in unit? What’s our gut feel?

As we rank the remaining applicants and check social media for all people that will be living in unit.

This usually helps complete the picture between what they shared with you directly and your gut feel.

After we meet everyone in person we select our top 2 and have them complete the full Naborly application and we run the credit check.

We have used many different apps but continue to go back to Naborly!

We call current/past landlords and current/past employment.

Best references are always past landlords (not their current one). They have nothing to loss by the reference they give and are usually more forthcoming about "problem tenants".

We do a final phone interview.

For this call we ask to facetime so we can see where they currently live (pre-covid we would even do this in person!).

Last standing gets the unit!

Then we sign leases! We use the RTA standard lease but also include amendments to ensure everyone is clear on the house rules and they have signed off on them.

Some people may think it's too much but you have to use everything at your disposal to ensure you place the best tenants in your units! As landlords (especially in Ontario) the most power you have is the screening and lease process. On the flip side, it’s also for the benefit of all our existing tenants, we do our best to place tenants that will be courteous to others and fit into the existing community within the properties. Win-win all around!