3 Easy Steps to Screening like the Pros!

Please note that this post is an excerpt of the webinar hosted by our sister company, The Landlord Code, where our co-founders coach DIY landlords how to avoid problem tenants and maximize rental profitability. Get access to more training like this in our (free!) private Facebook group HERE.

Screening is one of the top questions we see in all the DIY landlord groups out there. It’s also one of the top places that I see people on the regular making super, super easily avoidable mistakes that I know are causing them pain and pain and money. Here’s the thing everybody likes to help, especially if you’re on an online bore, you want to help somebody. Who’s got a question. You’re like, look, I’ve been there. This is the thing that I did. I don’t, unfortunately, with all good intentions, sometimes you get bad advice. And so today what we’re going to do is sort of clear the air, give you a clean slate to work off of and make you and help you understand the things that you should do baseline. Just to make sure you’re set up for success with your tenant when you go out to rent your property. Yeah. So today We are giving you three insider screening tips for screening your tenants. Next time you have a vacancy at your rental.

And if you’re one of the agents or property managers who follow us, we may be dropping some tips that maybe your agency doesn’t actually have you doing as part of your process. So we’ll share a quick story about that. So we work locally in the bay area. For those of you who don’t know us on a national level, we work in Marin County. It is a suburb just north of the San Francisco. Basically, If you don’t know us on a national level,  this is your opportunity to see them before they were stars. We know a lot of property management companies. We know a lot of agents from our days as baby agents. When we were first getting started to we’ve been in the industry 16 years now started over a billion dollars worth of rentals, less than a 1% eviction rate. So here’s the story. We have a good friend who worked, who basically we came up with in the leasing world. We received the same training. We worked at the same company before we started ours. And we found out not that long ago that her company does not pull their own credit reports. They rely on the tenants.

And this is a legit company in San Francisco doing a ton of leasing and property management and are today in today’s day and age accepting self supplied credit reports. Oh man, that is just, that’s just a recipe for disasters. So much risk. And we’re going to Cover that a little bit further in today’s training on today’s show. But my point in bringing it up is that even when you’re working with a property management company or an agent, they may not have some of the process and protocols that we teach in our program, or that we utilize for our clients here at foundation homes, property management. So if you’re an agent or a property manager, or even if you’re a landlord and you’ve hired a property manager after today’s training, it might be worth asking, Hey guys, are you doing X, Y, and Z. When it comes to my screening, Tell you the D we just didn’t start off knowing how to do all these things. We just started asking better questions. We had to suffer a lot of pain. We had to suffer a lot of like bad feelings, sleepless nights, lots of multimedia martini evenings. Pre-kids when we could like throw back a couple martinis, more repercussions. But as a result, we come up with this criteria and it’s really provided some really awesome results inside of our company. And more importantly for the clients that we service. So we’re just going to drop them on you right now. He wants you to just jump into it. So let’s jump into our first tip. So the first tip, this is something I’m very passionate about, and I, I really want to drive this point home. We’re going to go circle back to it at the end. But the first thing is to establish your criteria for being a tenant in your property. So the things I like to talk to my clients about and let them know about, and what you should also know is like,

Hey, look, what’s your minimum FICO score. If I go score is the score that you get on your credit report. So you want to establish that in our market, we say 700. That’s our personal establish FICO score minimum. The second thing is how what’s the, what’s the minimum income that you’re going to look at for us. It’s three times the monthly rent in gross household income, and that can come from anywhere, but generally speaking, that’s what you want to look at. And then you also want to get an application from each adult living in the property. So what does that mean? That means if you’re a husband and wife or your roommates, or your husband, husband, wife, and wife, or your brother and sister, you’re both living in the property. You definitely want an application from each adult. Yeah. So there is a lot to know about screening and what we’re trying to establish with this tip. Number one is that you need to have a process for it. So whatever your guidelines look like when you come to owning your rental, you are owning a business, right?

And the most successful businesses have processes and structure built around them. And that’s what we spend a lot of time teaching in our program, which we’ll tell you about a little bit more at the end today, but we spend a lot of time focusing on the process. So from tip one, we want you to take away what is your screening criteria, and you want to have it written, and then you want to stick to it, Stick to it. And I also would recommend posting your criteria in your ad, and also at the property. If it’s vacant, you can put it on the front door or an invisible area, maybe in the kitchen, on the counter or on the refrigerator. So people, as they walk through the property, they see it. And if you have a word document, you can create a PDF. When people ask for an application, you would also include that with your application. So you want to make it visible wherever you can, as like a<inaudible> CYA tactic, right? Cause we there’s a lot of fair housing things to consider when you’re listing your rental, when you’re showing your rental, when you’re qualifying applicants. And there’s a lot of risk in making a misstep when it comes to fair housing. And actually later on our, as part of our summer series, we are actually bringing on a fair housing attorney to talk about some of the top mistakes that’s coming up in a few weeks. We’re excited About that.

That’s that’s going to be great. And so, as someone personally, who hates process, or as a process aversion, I have a reversion to process and systems. Everybody in my company knows this. I stick to this one because I know how muchpain it can cause. So definitely establish your screen criteria, have a process. How the system, you say You a process, but when it comes to folding a towel, this guy holds towels like a pro. And if I dare make an effort to fold a towel Off with their heads, listen, my corner sheet game is like untouchable, right? So process this, the second thing is you want to do your own diligence and I’m gonna let Darcy run with this one, because this is a personal passion project for her Darcy run this.

So doing you don’t you’re you’re you want some help. I’ll try to start getting started off. Are you doing your own diligence, doing your own due diligence, due diligence, doing your own due diligence Is an important part of the process of screening your tenants. So if you’ve hired an agent to do this for you, they will be doing it. But here’s the part where you might want to ask some questions.You don’t just take the tenant’s word for anything. The tenant submits their application to you, and it is your job as the landlord, protecting your business and protecting your asset to verify all the information on this application. So this means number one, pulling your own credit report, do not accept a self supplied tenant credit report. It is way too easy in today’s day and age to fabricate anything, let alone a credit report. And we’ve literally seen it. Yeah, I’ve got a great story about that. So years ago, early on in my business, this is when the market crashed oh 8 0 9. I was working with a PR perspective out looking for a property. He applied didn’t qualify. Unfortunately, we did not move forward with that person. Then I received a phone call from a prospective client that I was going to work with and she said,

Hey, look, I want to work with you, but I have some applicants. I’m looking at them first. And if they don’t work out, I will call you. And since I knew the market was pretty, had a lot of, had a lot more properties than it had actual prospects. I just asked the question, Hey, would you mind telling me who that applicant is? And she said, she gave me their name and sure enough, that was the same person that I turned down. Right. I denied for this other property. And I said, that’s interesting. They didn’t have great credit. When I looked at their application before she said, oh yeah, well, they made me they’re out there. Their credit report and their credit score is in the high seven hundreds. And then I asked her for the credit report so I could review it. It was my credit report that he resubmitted to them Photoshop the number and resubmit it. So fortunately she dodged a bullet, but it was, she was lucky because it was very, it was lucky. But you know, at the end of the day, you just want to make sure you get your own credit report. You can run it. It’s very simple, right? And again, When you, even if you’re working with an agency or a property management company, you want to ask them, where are you getting your report? So part of the service that we provide at foundation homes, property management is we can personally certify that this credit report that we are presenting to our clients, we have polled and there’s a lot of rules around the regulations around pulling credit. And we did, if you missed the episode, we had a mark Urdang from Abel screening on the show a few weeks ago. So we covered some of that, but you want to make sure however you’re doing it, that you can verify the source of this credit report.

So that’s part of doing due diligence. The other part is making sure that you’re verifying your references via an arm’s length transaction Arms, right. Arms length. I was like, right here, I’m blank. Arms-length transaction. Do something to help our business. There you go. Arms length transaction. You want to make sure that you verify you talk to people, right? I wanna Make sure that you are not talking to your applicant’s cousin or your applicant’s best friend, whether you’re verifying the income verification or the previous tendency verifications. So one of the best tricks in the industry to do that is to slip in a false piece of information, because if you’re talking to someone’s supervisor and you say, applicant, Bob makes XYZ income and you,listen, you say he makes a hundred thousand dollars. The supervisor’s going to be like, Hmm, that doesn’t sound right. He actually makes 75,000, right. And 75,000, hopefully that’s the number that’s on the application. You’ve verified this as the right person. However, if it’s a fake reference, they’re just going to agree with whatever you say. So you can do that for the landlord reference to write, just quote the incorrect amount of rent or quote the incorrect amount of time. And that’s an awesome, insider’s tip to make sure that you are speaking to an actual arm’s length reference for whatever it is. You’re verifying on the application. I know here, you can use that same trick to find out if your kid’s lying to you and or if your spouse is cheating on you, you just live in some weird information that you already know the answer to. And if they lie, you’ve caught them. Red handed. Your spouse is trying to come up with a super secret birthday surprise for you. And you just ruined the surprise.Wow. Either way. I mean it’s 50, 50, right? You’ll probably sleep better knowing the truth.

Okay? Moving on the last thing, the last thing you want to do, and this is going back to number one. So I’m going to spin it all backwards, but not bad, but going back to number one, the numbers don’t. So when you establish your criteria, we talked about, talk about the income, the FICO scores, and doing your Darcy, went into doing your own diligence. The numbers don’t lie. The numbers are going to tell you the whole truth about the applicant. Stories will come up. Every single time you put a property on the market. You’ve got a story about someone who lost their job or has had to fall some rough times. They’re putting life together and your heart is going to want to help these people out. But at the end of the day, most stories do not have a happy ending. So trust the numbers, the numbers are ultimately going to tell you everything you need to know about this applicant based on whether or not they qualify or they do not. It’s like doing math, right? Two plus two is always going to equal four. It’s never going to equal five, no matter how many times you do it, I’ll be taking math advice from the guy who took like college algebra, algebra, like four times. I mean, look, I know my algebra now, so there you go. Like, I need, maybe I liked algebra. Maybe I liked the teacher. Maybe I liked the teacher. I just decided to stay in the class. I don’t know the plot Thickens. The blood thing is, so we have a story about this. So we Had dear client. Okay. Well, my algebra, I repressed that we had a Really great client years ago. We rented their home year after year. They would travel to the south of France and we would rent their home every year for six months furnished.

And one year they had a friend of a friend come to them and they said, Hey, we really want to rent to this friend of a friend. And we said, okay, well, she needs to still go through the application process. So we put her through the processlow and behold credit comes up, awful, awful. I don’t remember, but it might’ve had a five and five Did not meet our qualification standards at all. And they said, look, She’s going through a divorce. She’s a friend of our friend. We really trust her. We really want to rent to her. And I said, okay, we don’t recommend it. And I was sure to put it in an email as a brokerage, right? That’s our obligation. We are not recommending this, but you are making this decision. And so we will follow your direction. Yeah. So lo and behold, fast forward, I don’t know, three months into lease. She’s not paying the utility bills. She’s damaging the house. They ended up asking her to leave early. I don’t recall whether she left early or not, but I do know that she left them hanging with damage to the house and a bunch of unpaid utility bills and to the tune of hundreds of dollars, because she’d been in there and it was all of the utility bills that were in the owner’s name in this case. And they were just left holding the bag. And what are you going to do? Go after her for that money?

She’s got awful credit. She’s got absolutely no reason to care about any threat of taking her to small claims court. You’re never going to be able to get that money. So that was a hard lesson for them to learn. At the end of it, they said, Darcy, we are never going to not take your advice again. We shouldn’t have done that. We learned our Lesson person telling Darcy’s that she’s right. That’s awesome for me. That’s great. But here’s the thing about that, that applicant. And applicant’s like that person is that when they get into a property, they’ve basically crossed the th they’ve jumped over the biggest hurdle. And after that, they really don’t have any intention of following through with their obligations as a tenant, which means being good stewards of the property and paying their bills. So you definitely credit reports knowing their income and making sure that’s all verified is going to help you run your business. It would be the same as if you were to open up a restaurant and serve lunch. You wouldn’t want to serve lunch to people who, who you know, are going to pay. If someone walks in there and tells you, it shows you all evidence that they’re not going to pay and they’ve run out on you before you probably wouldn’t serve them much. Probably wouldn’t. So we know there are a lot of good people out there, right? And your landlord, and you’re hearing the story. You want to be softhearted, especially if it starts to involve, you know, like single mothers and kids or anything that kind of pulls at your heartstrings. We know you’re good people. And we know it’s really hard sometimes to know in those scenarios, but you are also running a business unless you bought this rental property specifically to be a charity. And there certainly are cases where that is the intent of the property, unless you’ve purchased it with that intent. This is not a charity. This is a business. And it is the, this rental property is the sum of things that you have worked really hard for in your life to acquire this property, right? So you have to treat it like a business. And that’s the mistake that we do. See, it’s a mindset mistake that we see DIY landlords and other independent landlords making all the time is not really thinking about it like a business and just reacting to decisions like the emotional reaction of hearing. A really compelling story for getting about what the credit report says, not verifying the references, not checking where the credit report came from, right? Those are all things. You’re a good person you want to look past, but when it comes down to what’s best for you and your business, and you not going into the whole hundreds or thousands of dollars, well, sticking to your cleaning, setting one, as we talked about your screening criteria, to checking all your references yourself, or knowing how they’re checked, and three and three, not using your I’m not making decisions With them. Shetries to see in and try to see the numbers work, but working based off the numbers. And I will say this now more than ever, you really need to try to avoid tenants who are going to harm your property. Not just because of new legislation, that’scome into effect. There’s always new legislation that’s coming to effect. But the other thing that people aren’t really talking about that’s, that’s huge right now is the cost of materials. The cost of materials has gone up considerably. So getting sheet, rock wood, any type of appliances finishes, they’re all costing more money. So now more than ever, you really want to strive to get tenants. We’re going to take care of your property and appreciate the space that you’re providing for them. Yeah. So there’s a massive, what we’ve found in the gosh 16 years we’ve been in the industry is there’s a massive knowledge gap, right? Of most landlords here is your newbie landlord, Britten, shiny, just starting out, ready to get started with the investment property. Here is the experienced landlord. Who’s been through it all who actually knows how to do things. Who’s running it profitably predictably and like a business, right? But there’s this massive knowledge gap in between. And like down here is like a lot of pain and alligators.

And This is not, it there’s a lot of suffering down there, sound there. But what if, what If you could have a bridge that could get you from here to here in a nice, happy, easy way? Like, it doesn’t have to be hard, right? It doesn’t being alandlord and learning all this stuff. You don’t have to go through all the alligators and all the pain. Cause you know what? You, people like us. Who’ve done it for you. Right? We’ve learned all of them. We’ve Paid the debt. We’ve paid the dummy tax and we’ve seen the worst case scenarios. And what we’re going to try to do is provide you a path to get to from one side of being a newbie landlord, to being a profitable knowledge-based successful landlordbusiness owner, who’s got toes in the sand beach drinks and all that. Yeah. So the newbie landlord can also be a very experienced landlord who maybe just hasn’t really been paying attention or who has not had any reason. It’s just kind of been coasting and reacting, but maybe something has happened that has made this experience. Landlord sort of wake up and say, oh, maybe there’s some things I really need to revisit or brush up on to get out of this area. And look, if this is the first time you’re thinking about it, it’s not your fault, right? It’s the media’s fault. The media tells you, this is the media’s fault. They tell you the HG HGTV dream of buyer by your vacation rental, by your investment property, fix it or flip it. And these guys turn over properties in like 30 minutes, right on, on television. And they also talk about like rich dad, poor dad. Robert Kiyosaki is a genius. And he’s written some great books about real estate investment, but he doesn’t get into the nitty gritty. It’s very high level. So it gives you the kind of the baseline for where to start. There’s this whole other side of it that talks about the management, the things that actually can actually go wrong, go wrong with your property, dealing with tenants, knowing how to make business decisions around your property so that you can reach that level of sophistication and being a profitable rental business owner. Right? I like you got Into it for the right reasons. And if you have a rental, you did something right. And congratulations, you’re already ahead of 90% of the people out there who were just kind of thinking about becoming a landlord. So you already had the thing, you’ve done the thing and that’s something to be proud of. But now you have a choice. How are you going to proceed? Are you going to be the person who walks off the edge of the bubble, but down here, or do you want to be the guy? Do you want to be the gal? Who’s the toes in the sand. Pina colada in hand, cell phone is ringing inside and you don’t care. You’re not panicked. If it’s a tenant breaking your lease or a tenant giving you another maintenance request, you don’t have that like fear because you have a solution, you have a roadmap and you know what you’re doing. So that’s a good segue. We have a great roadmap for you that we’d like to offer you. Sheila, Do you mind throwing up the, thescreen-share and we want to say, we are going to take questions. We know there are a lot of you who had write in questions particularly about screening, or you may have another issue that’s come up. So we’re going to take questions at the here, but we do want to show you. I know those of you who’ve been following us. Know we’ve been talking a lot about this for the last few months, and we are super excited to be able to announce and give a special opportunity for those of you who are here in our network to join us on our beta launch, founding members Launch of my course. So we just dropped this for the first time last week. So this is week two that we’re making this offer. We are doing a special beta launch of the landlord code, profitable property roadmap. So would you like to say hello to a profitable rental property, predictable income and problem-free tenants while living the landlord life that you deserve and that you signed up for?

Right? I would absolutely. So the thing that we run into people we run into a lot, oftentimes with landlords is they didn’t realize how much work the running a rental business actually is. They didn’t, they thought that they could just buy this thing, put it on cruise control and the money would just flow, right? Like I’ve got a friend Who will take care of it. I’ve got a handyman who I can call, but people aren’t really recognizing like the amount of thought and time and planning that might go into like one work order that your tenant might submit or about some of the legislation you need to be aware of on the backend when processing a security deposit disbursement. So you don’t end up in small claims court Or that handyman that you are. So you’re dependent on dice. When someone goes on vacation just around the time that you really need them, like, what are you going to do then? You’re right. Candy, good handyman or like gold right now. So, but what if we told you that owning a rental property doesn’t have to be stressful? And what if it could be not only problem-free but profitable and you can look like this young lady, that’s what I’m going to look like soon, whenever we’re Allowed to book our next beach vacation. So how, how would that feel for you if you had that feeling for those of you who have felt some pain before, raise your hand, put it, put your hands in the air. If you felt that, you know what we’re saying, how would that make you feel to have a painless and profitable rental?

And what would that open? What would that make possible for you and your family And consider for a minute that, you know, if you could just focus on your family, your job and not have to deal with the headaches and all the stuff that will be the distractions and noise of bad tenants and fixing problems at your property, how would you feel about your life? Knowing that your, your rental property is actually making you money, right? And even more than that, what we’d love to see is for you to get out of this place of kind of confusion and not knowing and be so awesome at running your first rental property, that you are not motivated to go out and buy that second one and third one, cause you’re not afraid and you have a plan. So that’s what we really want for It. And, and here’s the thing. It’s not this isn’t rocket science, but it does take asking better questions and knowing the better answers. And so we’d like to offer you today is the million dollar mindset method or the profitable property roadmap. So this is what we’ve been working on. Basically the sum of, I don’t want to say the sum of our existence, but some of our property managers existence. So here’s what we’ve got for you guys. It’s an online digital course. It’s 10 learning modules. We are going to take you from the start of your property management cycle all the way through to the end. We are going to be there. Step-by-step, we’ve got checklists for you. We’ve got tools for you.

We’ve got videos and we made it super easy for you to consume whether you like watching videos, whether you prefer podcast style, whether you prefer to read it in a blog, we’ve made it short, fast, easy, digestible, and straight to the point. So we can get all this stuff. That’s in our brains, rambling around, out here for you. So you can get the bare minimum dose of what you need to run your Property. And you can also ask questions about that in a Facebook group, which is amazing, which is the other added benefit. You have a network of like-minded individuals and access to us and other pros to answer your question. So phase one, we’re going to take you through creating your property cash cow. So we’re going to give you all of our inside tricks that we are giving to make your property as profitable as possible, right? From the get-go. I went from average to Savage. That’s a Christopher original phase two is starting off on the right foot, not the right route, starting off on the right foot, starting off on the right road, phase two. So knowing how to get the ball rolling and have the basic foundation, so you can get your tendency off on the right foot. Phase three is managing the tendency for less headache and more profits. That’s something I’m super passionate about.There are tips and tricks that you can use. And again, we’re going to give them to you to make it super easy, but there are a lot of things we do not see DIY landlords and all of our lease. Only clients who’ve come to us over the years. We see these preventable mistakes that they’re making. Same. As we talked about in the screening today, the mistakes that people make that cost them time and money and stress are really easy to avoid. So we’re going to show you how to avoid them.

And then Grand finale is determining the success of your tendency. And I like to always tell people that you can never tell how well a tendency actually went until after the tenant has moved out of the property. So we go into, we take a deep dive into that and show you how, what would that actually means for you? All right. So this is all module one, module two. I think we can, we can go through this pretty quickly, Sheila. So this is a little bit more detailed. So we do have a link where you guys can look at all this, and we have this laid out in detail. Exactly. What’s included in each section, but here’s the awesome part about what we’re doing for you and our network. Whether you found us through, you know, us through the foundation homes company, maybe you’ve been sent here by your realtor or a friend, maybe you found us on Facebook. However you happen to come to us today. As of right now, if you’re watching you’re in our network and we’re going to give you an opportunity to this beta launch special plus we’ve got a fast acting bonus for the first seven people who sign up, we’ve got an extra special bonus. So Sheila, let’s go ahead and get through all the modules. People can take a look at all this stuff on their own. Okay? So this program is packed with value, but when you join, you’re also going to get these bonuses valued at 4 85 or actually even more. There’s a lot of bonuses we’ve come up with for you.

And then can we go ahead and next screen, thank you. All right. So the first one, we’re going to give you the back to basic series. So this is a lot of stuff. If you’ve been following us here in our summer series, a lot of the topics we’re covering here, along with tools, it’s going to be a summary of all this.It’s going to be awesome. And the ROI prediction calculator is another bonus. That’s great. It basically allows you to look at your rental property from the day you bought it to how much it’s worth currently and how much you’re renting it for and show you like a real life snapshot of what’s happening today and what you can actually consider happening in the future as to predict it’s a prediction tool, essentially, it’s almost, it’s like basically crystal ball. It Is kind of like a crystal ball. So we’re going to give you a troubleshooting guide, what to do if your property doesn’t rent, the tricks that we’ve been using for our team over the years bonus forest SOS, I have a problem tenant. Another super common question we get. So we’re going to give you our methods for dealing with The problem. I’ve put on my fire hat many times to help lay Lawrence out with, with, with tennis that are challenging and we’ve helped them write the ships. You’re going to be able to get like inside of my brain, avoid all the weird stuff that we also learned a lot of stuff, but get to the part about, you know, how to deal with tenants, the algebra part, for sure, for sure. The algebra part. All right. And Then bonus number five. This is something we’re working on right now. I’m super excited about this. This is going to be our property management expos. So we’ve realized that a lot of people who follow us are working with a property management company and they’re following us because they want to learn more about their rental owning the rental and essentially what they should be watching their property management company do. So obviously, as insiders in the industry, we know a lot of things that maybe you don’t know. So we’re working on an expoday. So you can know you’re working with the right company or if maybe you want to do So now you get lessons, you get tools, checklists, flowcharts guides, transformative action, worksheets to show you where you are today, what you, things that you’re going to do and what that’s actually going to look like for you in the future. So it’s a real life snapshot of what you can do with, with your rental business and what it will look like if you follow these tools, right?Because Being a landlord, it can be lonely. Sometimes you don’t know if you’re doing it right, but it doesn’t have to be hard. As long as you have the playbook. As long as you have a roadmap, as long as you have someone in front of you, who’s already gone through the pain, showing you how to do it. You can skip all the pain and the alligators and all that, skip all that stuff and just cut right to the peanut colada in hand. So we’re going to drop this course in September for 8 97, but we’re doing a beta launch, which is actually also going to be a cohort launch, which is going to give you access to us. We’re going to be teaching this real time with you guys on a, on a weekly basis. And we’re doing it for a very special price of 5 97, because we really want people to, to cash in on all this knowledge, Right? So this is a limited time offer. We’ve got limited seats available because we are going to be teaching it live, or you’ll be consuming the content. And then we’ll be going live and discussing the week’s content once a week together. So we are, there’s limited seats for this and the enrollment on July 19th for that. And then we do have a fast acting bonus for you. So for this first seven people who sign up from this week’s training, we are going to offer you your own personal screening, consult, meaning you are going to work with either Christopher or me. One-on-one, we’re going to go through your screening process for how you have set it up right now. And we are going to make suggestions, make improvements so that you have your own roadmap for your screening process. For next time you have a vacancy at your property. So this is not anything we’ve ever offered to anyone before. We’re super excited. If you have a vacancy now, and you want to jump in on this now is the time like, why not just get going today?

Because the information that you’re going to receive from this, from that is going to basically change how you run yourrental property. Yeah. So 5 97 Is the limited time offer limited seats. Enrollment ends July 19th, and then we’re going to start the program in August. And again, this is our founding members launch available only for you guys, because you’re here in our network. We’re going public in the fall, but this is your special price. You’re never going to see this price and these offers again. So we hope that we will see you join us. If you are ready to say goodbye to problem tenants, create a predictable income stream, reclaim your time and manage You, manage your rental property profitably. And problem-free literally, this is the key. This is what you watch HGTV. This is what you read about. This is what all those magazines are about. This is the whole tip. So this is the part they don’t talk about, show you the results, but they don’t show you how to get that. Right. Exactly. And we know that you people will eventually get there and we’d, and if you’re here watching a stay, it’s because there’s a reason for it, right? What we want to do is we know that this path will create the results for a long-term profitable rental business for you. Yeah. And we can’t wait to help you get there. So we have the URL here. You can read more about the course at profit profitablepropertyplaybook.com. I think we thank you. We have that on the next slide. Oh, I love that photo. Nice job, Megan. Nice. All right. So That’s where you can find us. That’s where you can read more. And then if you want to take advantage of our special offer that’s for this week show, just when you sign up and then you get that email response, just respond to the email and say, I want the bonus. I want the fast acting bonus. I want my screening. Perfect. All right.So now we can go ahead. We had quite a few questions come in. We’ll see how much time we have. If you’re watching us live either on zoom or Facebook, you can go ahead and throw your question in the chat.

We can take questions specifically about screening. We can take questions about the course, or if you have something separate related to property management, you can go ahead and put the screening and put your question in there as well. And I want to start with one that I know we didn’t get to. Last week. She had asked about trip and fall. She had said, look, if I have a tenant who moves into my property and has a trip and fall and wants to Sue me, is it possible for that tenant to Sue me as the landlord for that was the answer. That question, the answer is anyone can Sue anyone for anything. So you bet your bottom britches. She can Sue you for that. But the question comes out. What’s what’s going to happen to the lawsuit, right? So the first thing we always recommend to landlords is make sure you talk to a good landlord insurance agent, make sure you’ve had the right consultation to make sure you have the right landlord insurance policy for you, for your personal net worth for your property. That’s the first thing you want to make sure you’re covered on.Right? Right. Exactly. The second thing is you want to make sure you don’t have any hazards in your property, did this tenant trip and fall because you had some loose carpet and then it comes down to, were you aware of it? And didn’t fix it because that’s pretty easy negligence case. And that’s an argument for really taking really great care of your rentals, right? And being, knowing the types of things that could be a liability. The types of complaints, tenants have. That’s one area that our property management company really excels as knowing, helping advise our clients like, okay, this may seem like a little thing, but this is something you should really fix because it could be a liability XYZ. And this is Exactly, and this just goes back. We have a whole portion of our course that we talk about this, but it goes back about setting yourself up for success and looking at the property and making sure that you’ve done the things to your house, to your rental property, to avoid things like this, because let’s face it. As soon as a tenant moves into your rental property, you no longer have control of what goes on inside of there or who comes over. So there’s a lot of things that you can do to help protect yourself. Long-term and also, which will ultimately protect your, your pocket book and your bank account. But you need to, you need to set yourself up on the right foot and you set yourself up for success on the gate.

So that includes ensuring that your property is safe and habitable ensuring that you have the right insurance, like Darcy just said, and there was also this, an insurance that your tenant can also get for as part of living in your property. That would also protect you as well. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. And I see, we have a question coming up from Shane. Do you have a favorite credit check company? Okay. So that’s a good question, Shane, that comes up all the time. Almost every time we talk about screening. So we do use mark from able screening and he does have a product for individual landlords. So if you just go to it’s Abel screening.com, you can inquire with them and see what options they have. But basically you’re going to need to get qualified as a landlord because there are so many rules around credit reporting, and it’s not that complicated. It’ll take you a little bit of time. So that’s one way to do it. And then you can have your apps go directly through him and he gives you the credit and he’ll give you all your options. You can do. We do eviction checks through him, and then you can add criminal screening. That’s kind of a whole nother can of worms, but he’s got options and he and his company can walk you through that. Otherwise cozy.co I know is a resource that a lot of independent landlords Use from BiggerPockets, right? No cozy.co Just got acquired by apartments.com. And I’ve heard some rumblings out there that people aren’t as happy since the acquisition with the services offered, but those are ways to do it. You can also do it through Zillow though. We kind of consider Zillow to be the devil. And don’t really support That. Tell you this. We’ve been working with mark since 2005, so there we’re talking 16 years, he’s done it. He’s put together a great business. Mark was actually one of the original founders of, or worked with fair Isaac, the guys who did Jen built out? No, no, no. His story is he had the option to join onto fair eyes. You knew them personally, but he knows he’s been in the game for a long time. So we like him. He’s not a newbie. He’s not piecing it together. Everything he talks about is just coming from a great track record. So I love market able screening. I, here’s a great question from Laurie I’m about a year or a little more away from my first rental purchase, because, and, and she’s like, would you recommend, I sign up for the course now or away? I recommend you signing up for the course now because it is going to basically help you identify the rental property for yourself, identify how you can make that work for you the best way possible. It’s always good to know, have all the knowledge base and how that brain trust on the front end. And also you’ll be able to ask questions from us and other people in your group that will help you get the right breadth of property and ultimately make you more profitable. And Lori, what I will see, one thing that we’ve seen, and we talked about this in last week show with one of my good friends, who’s been kind of on the sidelines. She really wants to buy a property. She’s been waiting is that we see a lot of people kind of get stuck in never, never land, right? You want to buy a property, but I think people get stuck when they get afraid of the unknown. So one of the things as we were developing this course that we did it, I will call it. It is entry-level, but it, it does have a lot of elements that I think landlords who’ve been doing it a long time. Probably haven’t thought about it just because we’re approaching it from a property management ground up level versus a reactive level.

But like, I think new people, if you’re going to be a new landlord, the more, you know, the more confident you’re going to be stepping into your first rental and that confidence is maybe the thing that pushes you over the edge to say yes to a property, because the hardest part is saying yes to your first property. And then what you don’t want to be do is chasing after things and being reactive on The yeah. Having a game plan. But also like if you’re thinking about investing in a rental property and let’s say you were like, look, I’ve got three or four options here. You can ask the group or ask us directly like, Hey, what do you think is the best one? We can actually talk you through some, I don’t know, gaseous some, give you some talking points, give you some questions to ask, to make sure that you’re making the right decision for yourself, ultimately long-term Yeah. And the ROI calculator that we’re including. That’d be great. Yeah. That’s really Helpful in analyzing the deal. So there are a lot of like free tools. You can get out there. If you’re on like bigger pockets and stuff, they have great tools, I think, for their paid members. So we look at our chest a little bit differently and we try to put it in sort of like everyday language instead of like necessarily like investor, investor language, the way that we look at it and try to coach our clients to look at It. Yeah. Okay. Awesome. Well, I think we’ve gone a little bit over for today’s show. If you guys have future questions, if you’re in our private Facebook group, this one is the free group. Anyone can join. You could always throw a question during the week up, anytime in there, we have a lot of smart people in that group. We have seasoned the landlords. We have newbie landlords. We have other property managers. We have other industry professionals. We have people from our team. A lot of people are in that group. And then once we get started with this first cohort launch, we’re actually going to have a separate members only group, and that’s going to be more targeted and we’ll be able to get a little more private access to Christopher and me to help you with things like if you’re considering a rental, is this a good, is this the right one? And we do talk about picking the right rental. And if you guys have found any value from anything that we’ve talked about today or other other shows drop it in the chat, let us know. We’d love to hear back from you. If there’s things that you’d like us to cover. Tell us about it because we want to hear from you. Yeah. So this was episode four of the rental rescue show covering screening coming up next week, we are talking to a plumber to the Kenny, Kenny, Kenny. So awesome. You know, the number of jokes that we may or may not say on air that have been going back on our text thread, prepping for the Show. I’ve been working with Kenny for a long time. I trust him and his team implicitly with my property and all of our, the properties in our portfolio. He is just a wealth of knowledge. He actually called me before the show. He just, he’s just awesome. He’ll he can answer. He knows everything about plumbing. So What we’re going to be covered specifically is sort of the top three ways that he sees landlords waste money on plumbing, emergencies, and plumbing repairs. So this is going to be the type of show that is going to help you save more money and help you be more educated about some of these tenant plumbing complaints is probably, I would say plumbing is probably the biggest. He gets the number one maintenance call, like hands down, because lots of things can go wrong with plumbing, water heaters, sewage backups, the fibers, the whole thing.