This past week I have made a lot of progress. I have grown from just answering phone calls and emails, to being comfortable giving tours and sharing information with prospective tenants. Since Wednesday, I have shown thirteen families around our property. Nearly all of them have applied, but not one of them have made it through our application process.
In our application process we do a background check, eviction screening, and credit check. The most common denial is the credit check. During each tour, you spend a significant amount of time showing each family around the property and finding a unit that would suit their needs. After the family leaves, you spend more time putting together their file and connecting with them through phone calls. This is part of the job that I really like, it involves a lot of instant gratification. It also makes it harder to tell the families that they have been denied.
During these phone calls I have learned that people will react in a variety of ways. I have had prospective tenants attempt to bribe me to ‘overlook’ the results, tell me that the results are wrong, or genuinely understand that their credit is bad. In this situation, other professionals have advised me to explain to the customer that we do not do the screenings our self; instead, it is sent off to a third party company. We also let the customer know that we will email them a document with their reason of denial, and if something is incorrect they can contact that company. More often than not, the tenant is understanding, but rarely do they come back with proof of faulty screening results.