Who is your ideal tenant in Charleston? It’s likely a responsible, communicative resident who can be trusted to pay rent on time, take care of your property, and follow the terms of the lease agreement. Those are the things you should be looking for, and those are the tenants that all rental property owners are competing to find.
Placing and retaining qualified tenants is essential to the success of your Charleston rental property. If you don’t have high quality tenants in place, you might struggle to collect rent on time. There could be deferred or unreported maintenance. You might be left with property damage at the end of a lease term.
Good tenants lead to a positive (and profitable) rental experience. If you want to make sure you’re finding the ideal tenants for your rental property, let a Charleston property management company like TCS Management take care of the leasing process for you.
We’ll do a more efficient job of marketing your home, screening tenants, and getting the lease agreement signed. With professional property management partners, you can expect better tenants, higher rents, and a faster leasing period – which leads to lower vacancy rates.
Here’s how TCS Management can help you find the most qualified tenants.
Pre-Screening During the Marketing and Showing Process
We know how to pre-screen a tenant without actually screening them. When interested residents call for more information or to schedule a showing, we take the time to ask a few key questions that will tell us right away whether it’s worth our time and effort to show them your property. As we’re getting to know them, we’ll ask about:
- Anticipated move dates. It’s not a great idea to screen and approve tenants who aren’t ready to move for a couple of months. If your property is vacant right now, we want to attract tenants who are ready to move in within the next few weeks. This reduces vacancy loss.
- Reasons for moving. Ideal tenants typically move because they need more space or less space. They might want a specific neighborhood, or they’re hoping to be closer to work. All of these answers are easy to work with. But, if a tenant tells us they want to move because they’re about to be evicted over a rent dispute, we’ll hesitate to show them your home.
- Number of residents. Fair housing laws prevent us from asking detailed questions about who will be moving in, and we respect that. However, we can get an idea of how many people will reside in the home. We don’t want to rent a two-bedroom property to eight people, for example.
We also ask about pets and income and whether they’ve ever been evicted before. Once we have a set of satisfactory answers, we go ahead and schedule a showing.
Establishing Qualifying Rental Criteria
It makes things easy when tenants disqualify themselves.
This is a very good reason to have a set of qualifying rental criteria. At TCS Management, we put together this criteria and provide it to anyone who is interested in applying for our properties. Usually, applicants will know based on our criteria whether they have a good chance of being approved for the property. If their credit, income, or rental history does not meet our minimum standards, they often won’t bother applying. They don’t want to lose the application fee only to be denied.
By establishing and providing a set of qualifying rental criteria, we’re setting standards that every prospective Charleston tenant has to meet. This ensures only well-qualified residents are placed in your property, and it also protects you from any fair housing complaints. We’re able to demonstrate and document that every tenant is measured against the same standards. It’s objective and consistent.
Finding Charleston Tenants: Our Screening Process
With our technology and our experience, there are systems and processes in place to ensure we’re finding the most qualified tenants for your property. Everything we do is within the requirements of federal and state fair housing laws. We protect you in multiple ways during the screening process; we protect you from bad tenants, and we also protect you from the liability of an inconsistent screening process.
We automate our screening process to keep it objective and fair. Our application collects all the information we need to gather data and make decisions. We find your ideal tenant by considering:
- Income. We believe that tenants should earn at least three times the amount of monthly rent. Because rents have gone up so much recently, this has been a difficult threshold to meet. But, we want to be sure that the tenants we place can afford the rent we charge.
- Credit. We dig a little deeper into the credit report because we know a credit score doesn’t tell the entire story. A few late credit card payments are no big deal; what we don’t want to see is money owed to former landlords or utility accounts that are in collections.
- Eviction history. Recent evictions are a problem and a good reason for a denial.
- Rental references. We always ask for references from current and former landlords. This tells us whether the tenant performed well in past rental properties.
We make sure the application gives us permission to do all of these background checks, credit checks, and reference calling.
You might think it’s easy enough to screen tenants on their own, but in our experience, independent landlords either don’t screen rigorously enough or they set standards that no tenant can possibly meet.
We know how to market your home, manage showings, and ultimately screen applicants to find you an ideal tenant. Let’s get started. Contact us at TCS Management.
TCS Management is a full service property management company headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, also serving Cherry Hill, NJ, Wilmington, Delaware, Nashville, Tennessee and the Charleston, South Carolina area. We focus on single-family and multifamily residential property management of homes, condos, townhomes, and apartment buildings.
