A landlord background check is crucial when it comes to finding reliable and cooperative tenants for your rental property. Find out how to run an effective background check on your new tenants today.

Before you hand over the keys of your precious rental property to a new tenant, it's crucial that you find out as much as you can about him. So what are the cheap and easy ways of running a background check on your potential tenants?

Method 1: Ask All Your Potential Tenants to Fill in Application Forms

Asking your potential renters to fill in a tenant application form should be your first choice for a landlord background check because it is both free and highly effective.

As long as your application form does not include irrelevant questions or invade your applicant's privacy, don't worry about it being too lengthy. If someone is serious in renting your property, he will definitely take the time to fill it up.

What's more important is that your tenant application should ask the right questions. Crucial questions include their monthly income, job type, contacts of their previous landlord and their exact reason for moving away.

This application form is also highly helpful in case you need to evict your tenants in the future - If your tenant lies in his application form, you will be able to remove them from your rental property as long as the courts feel that you were misguided by the lies.

Method 2: Dig for Information from Your Tenant's Credit Report

While most landlords know that a credit report is valuable for checking if someone is likely to pay his rents on time, do you know that it also contains a wealth of information on your tenant's criminal and eviction history?

If your tenant has been arrested or charged in court before, his credit report will probably contain his criminal records. It is important that you don't have someone who is likely to commit crimes as your tenants. If they are caught carrying out illegal activities on your rental property, you may even risk having it being seized by the local authorities.

Method 3: Contact Your Tenant's Former Landlord and Employer

For those short listed tenants that pass your initial landlord background check, there is one last step you may want to take before signing your rental agreement with them.

You can look for your tenant's previous landlord and ask them for their experience and opinion. This will also give you a chance to double check the information that your tenant has written on the application form. If you spot any blatant lies, then it's a good idea to reject him.

Contacting your tenant's employer will also give you a better idea of his character and sense of responsibility. You can expect someone with excellent work ethics and a pleasant personality to turn out as a better tenant.  Teo Zhenjie