When faced with a respectable looking tenant who is keen to move in to one of your properties and has the necessary deposit, it might seem easier to skip the normal credit checks and hand over the key. After all, they look okay, so what can possibly go wrong?
Well think twice before cutting corners in your efforts to fill an empty property. You might assume somebody is a perfectly respectable pillar of the community with a decent job and enough cash to meet the monthly rent payments, but many potential tenants are not always what they appear to be.
Taking the time to run a credit and identity check on a potential tenant could save you an awful lot of grief in the long run. On average, around one in twenty tenants have CCJs against them, indicating that they have defaulted on some kind of credit payment in the not too distant past. Basic credit checks will pick up outstanding CCJs, bankruptcy or insolvency, verify a person’s identity and whether they have any aliases. Checks can also be made to verify a person’s financial standing and assess their ability to pay the rent on your property.
It is easy to forgo the credit checks and assume everything is going to be fine, but take it from me: rent arrears are a landlord’s worst nightmare. Once a tenant stops paying the rent, you will then be forced to take the necessary steps to have them evicted, and that will end up costing you a lot more than the original credit check would have!
