As a landlord, one of your prime objectives is to ensure that your tenants submit rent in good time and take good care of your rental properties. However, more often than not, you will find yourself embroiled in prolonged disputes with your tenants due to misuse of your rental housing units. Moreover, you will also encounter tenants who will want to be pursued every month before they submit their monthly rent arrears. Therefore, you stand a better chance to limit or even eliminate such painstaking and time consuming experiences if you adopt preventive measures. One of the most effective ways of avoiding future disputes with your tenants involves thorough screening of prospective tenants. Indeed, thorough screening of prospective tenants is a cautionary action that aims at ensuring that you let out your rental properties only to responsible, honest and trustworthy tenants. Some of the key instruments that you can utilize to screen your prospective tenants includes use of Legal forms such as rental application forms and rental Agreement forms.
Use of rental application forms
Rental application form is a very reliable instrument that you can use to screen your future tenants. Rental application forms represent some sort of interview in which applicants for rental houses reveal detailed information about themselves. You can then use the details provided by the prospective tenants in the Rental application forms to investigate the validity of the information provided. Some of the main details that you may require applicants to reveal in the rental application forms include: marital status, size of the tenant’s family, current and former landlords, current occupation of the tenants, reasons for moving houses, and amount of rent payable to the current landlord. Your rental application forms should also prompt the applicants to provide information about their income and employment status, credit history as well as information about bankruptcies and past evictions. You should also request the applicants to validate their information by appending relevant referees and the contact details of the referees. In fact, you will find credit reports to be very convenient in ascertaining the abilities of your respective tenants to pay rent because they provide candid histories of individual concerning punctuality in paying rent and other bills as well as past bankruptcies and evictions. This approach of digging out current and historical information about applicants will facilitate your desire to house responsible and cooperative tenants.
Signing of rental agreements
Once you approve the rental application request of a future tenant, the next important step that you must undertake is signing of a rental agreement that clearly spells out to the tenant the terms and conditions for renting your property. The Rental Agreement should be signed before the tenant occupies your rental property. Signing of Rental Agreement is a legal way of committing your prospective tenants to comply with your prescribed conditions for renting your property, failure of which they risk legal action being taken against them. Some of the key details that should be contained in a Rental Agreement include:
• Total rent payable per month;
• Security deposit payable before a tenant occupies your house;
• Terms and conditions for refunding security deposit when the tenant vacates the property;
• Clear statement as to who will be responsible for paying different bills such as electricity and water bill;
• Terms and conditions for using additional facilities such as car park
• Visiting hours
• Clear statement as to who will be responsible for different types of repairs and maintenance of the house.
It is always important to remember that all your actions as a landlord are limited within the stipulated state laws of your respective state. You must endeavor to avoid contravening state specific laws due to the fact that different states in the US have different laws that govern landlord-tenant relationships. You can avoid contravening state laws by employing the use of Landlord forms or real estate forms that have been designed by experts. There are some sites which offer Free rental application forms online.
