Don’t Take “When” For Granted In Property Management

In property management when talk about screening tenants, deposits, leases but not enough about the “when” in property management we sometimes take for granted.

By David Pickron

When we talk about property management, we usually talk about the why and the how. Why you screen tenants. How you write a lease. Why a deposit matters. How to handle maintenance. But after a phone call I got a few months ago, I’ve realized we don’t talk nearly enough about the when — and that’s the piece we take for granted most.

Here’s the call. A client rang me convinced we’d dropped the ball on a background check. He said we missed a criminal record on an applicant he’d already moved in. We pulled the file and reran everything. We had, in fact, found a record — an arrest, with no conviction. Under Fair Housing and FCRA rules, that’s not something you can use to deny someone housing, so it never should have changed his decision anyway. What we had flagged, on the original report, was a prior eviction. He never asked about it.

But the real problem wasn’t the record at all. It was the order. He’d moved the tenant in first, tenant problems started a few months later, and only then — after the damage was already done — did he run the background check. He didn’t do anything wrong on paper. He just did it backwards.

That’s the lesson I keep coming back to: every step in this business sets up the next one. Skip the order, and you’re not managing a property anymore — you’re doing damage control.

So here’s the timeline I’d ask every landlord to hold themselves to:

• Set your criteria first. Before you list anything, write down your standards — income, credit, criminal, rental history — and apply them the same way, every time. Want a starting point? Email [email protected] and we’ll send you a sample, detailed criteria.
• Market to that standard, not to a type of person, and put a “code word” at the end of your ad so you know who actually read it. (Want to hear more on this one? Search for the Rent Perfect Podcast on your favorite platform — we go deeper on code words there.)
• Show the property consistently. Hand out your criteria at the showing — it answers half your applicants’ questions before they ask, and it protects you if someone applies anyway and doesn’t pass.
• Screen before anything else happens — not after move-in, not after problems start. This is where a real investigative screening company earns its keep. Watch for red flags at deposit time too — someone who can’t afford it, or wants to pay it “later” — and never call a deposit “last month’s rent.”
• Prepare a lease that matches the criteria you set on day one. Your criteria isn’t just a checklist — it’s really a summary of the lease itself. If the two don’t match, one of them is wrong.
• Introduce your tenant to the neighbors. It tells your tenant the property is being watched by someone other than you. Bring home that new puppy you weren’t approved for? I will definitely find out.
• Hand over keys last — after the lease is signed and funds have cleared, not a day before.
• Document the move-in condition, set up automatic rent pay, and line up your vendors before you need them.

Understanding that one process leads into the next helps you stay on the same page with your applicants — and hopefully, down the road, you’ll have a five-year tenant with very little problems. That’s when life is great.

About the author:

David Pickron is President of Rent Perfect and a fellow landlord who manages several short- and long-term rentals.  He is a private investigator and teaches organizations across the country the importance of proper screening.  His platform, Rent Perfect, was built to help the small landlord find success.