Want to learn how to prescreen tenants before a showing? Here’s exactly how I do it without wasting time on unqualified renters.
This guide only covers how to prescreen tenants BEFORE they ever apply or pay a fee. I don’t let anyone apply until they’ve passed my prescreening and seen the home in person. Turns out, this is a highly controversial topic in the landlord/investor world because every landlord has their own way of doing things and think they are correct. I have my reasons for doing it my way, and here is the number one reason…
I require a good credit score, and people with good credit scores have many options and they know it.
If I tell them to fill out an application and to pay money for credit and background checks before they even set foot in my rental house, they will disappear and find another landlord. I don’t blame them – I have good credit and I would not fill out an application and pay money just to see a place. When I tell you that these people have options – this is no joke. I routinely have people with 750+ credit scores, and they could buy a house. These types tend to take care of properties – like their credit depends on it. 😉
I refuse to use Zillow applications. Zillow missed two evictions I later found in public court records. And a future tenant can pay for their application and credit/background check once through Zillow and send it to as many landlords as they want for 30 days.
WARNING: The desperate and evicted ones will buy one report and send it to EVERYONE in the entire area.
And if someone applies to your rental and you decline them because of something you see in a credit or background check, you have to send each applicant an adverse action letter. Learn all about that.
So prescreening is an EXTREMELY important step if you are not requiring an application and credit/background check before someone sees your rental in person. You want to make sure you are not wasting your time showing your rental to someone who is unqualified. Intensely prescreening your prospective tenant is the answer! I will walk you through the process.
You must follow Fair Housing law. Always use objective criteria like income, rental history, background checks, and payment history – never stereotypes or personal assumptions. If you are incapable of doing this, then you MUST hire a property manager instead. They will follow Fair Housing rules for you and charge you a large sum of cash for the privilege of doing so. I avoid this by doing it myself and pocketing the cash I would otherwise pay a property manager to do.
If you’re newer and want a quick reference for landlord and real estate terms, I’ve put one together.
Before Prescreening: Make Sure Your Listing Is in the Right Places
First, make sure you have your listing on Zillow, Apartments.com, and TurboTenant. Listing on those 3 sites will get your listing shared to most every rental page out there. This post walks through how I list my rentals.
So now you have your rental listed and wonder, what do I do now? You sit back and wait for the madness to begin! That’s right folks, this part of property management will make you question humanity. You’ll start seeing what I call a “Story.”
These are the people who send long emotional paragraphs about why you should rent to them – before you’ve even asked a question.
I don’t engage with a “Story”.
I am a business, not a charity.
This mindset is why I’m willing to let a property sit vacant rather than rush the wrong tenant in.
Landlord Tip: If a renter sends you their life story before seeing the house, they’re not sharing – they are warning you.
If someone replies to my screening questions email and gives me several paragraphs of information I didn’t ask for, I am probably about to see a “Story”. Qualified renters don’t send complete strangers the details of their life story in multiple paragraph form to someone who simply had a rental listing on Zillow. Trust me on this. You’ll see.
Who Ghosts You (And Why)
Your leads from the places you listed online (except Facebook Marketplace) will come through via email. When you get that first lead, you will be very excited!!
Don’t be. It will likely go nowhere. With my screening process, I could honestly go through 50 leads and have just 3 people that make it through my process to even get a showing.
Why They Contacted You At All
Most people will ghost you when you start asking questions about them, and that’s totally normal. These are mostly the people with evictions, bad credit, little income, shaky job history, sex offenders, etc. They saw in your ad that you have criteria, but they decided to contact you anyway even though they know they don’t qualify. Why? Because there are a lot of private landlords out there that don’t actually do credit and background checks and they are hoping you are one of them. They may want to try sweet talk their way into your rental via a “Story”. And if they tell you they are looking for a private landlord…
Red Flag: If they tell you they need a “private landlord,” that usually means they really hope you won’t check their credit history and background.
Physical Cash Doesn’t Impress Me
Many landlords will also accept anyone who waves cash in front of their face. I have quite literally had cash waved in my face two times by strangers that approached me on the street in front of a rental. Several thousand dollars each time. I told them to put their money away and fill out an application if they were interested. They didn’t, because they knew they didn’t qualify. They certainly tried to convince me on the spot to accept them. In fact, one would not leave and insisted on talking to the “guy in charge”, so he got a good lesson on that.
“No.” is a complete sentence.
Screening Questions
To make sure I’m not wasting my time on a showing, I make EVERYONE reply to an email filled with prescreening questions. You are going to have a few people throw a temper tantrum. Don’t worry, they are probably in the middle of eviction or have a credit score of 450. I have tweaked the wording in this email for 7 years, and it works well for me.
Here it is, exactly as I send it…
How to Prescreen Tenants: Copy & Paste This Exact Screening Email
Thanks for your interest in the 2 bedroom house at 123 Main St, Somewhere, Indiana. We require a credit, background, and eviction check for all adults over the age of 18 who will be living in the house. The monthly rent is $1200/month, the security deposit is $1350, and tenant pays gas, electric, water, and trash. First month’s rent and security deposit are due at lease signing. The house is available now. We require a minimum monthly household income of at least $4200/month for this home.
Please answer the following questions.
- What is your monthly household income? This income will need to be able to be verified during the application process.
- What date would you like to move in?
- Do you have any prior evictions? Have you ever been late paying your rent?
- Do you smoke/vape indoors or outside?
- We require a background screening for all adults in the household.
- Do you have any animals that will be in the house?
- How many adults over the age of 18 will be living in the house?
- We do require a minimum credit score of 625 for this house. What is your credit score?
- Will your current and past landlords give a positive reference about your payment history and how well you have taken care of your home? Or do you own your current home?
- What is your reason for moving?
Thank you, and let me know if you have any questions.
The Fireside Ridge
555-555-1234
Copy This Text Too…
I send that email above, and then I text them this message:
“Hi John! I received an email from Zillow that you are interested in the house I have for rent at 123 Main St in Somewhere. I sent you an email with some questions to fill out before we set up a showing. My name is (insert name), let me know if you have any questions.”
If I don’t hear from them after about 2 days, I send another email and a text asking if they are still interested in the house. It looks like this,
“I’m setting up showings for this weekend at the house at 123 Main St in Somewhere. Let me know if you are still interested and we can set up a time for a showing.”
If they actually respond, remind them you need the questions in the email answered first.
What I Do Before Ever Meeting Them at the House
So for the very few qualified people that actually respond to the questions in the email, I do several other things before I’m meeting this stranger – from the internet – in a house.
First, I check to make sure they actually answered ALL the questions! It’s a big red flag if they skipped something, and I call them out on it, nicely of course. They were hoping you didn’t notice because you are not going to like their answer to that particular question.
Then, you read over all of their answers VERY CAREFULLY to see if they really do meet the criteria you posted in the ad. If they don’t meet the criteria, (they have a 560 credit score and you posted 625), I feel ZERO need to waste another second of my life on them and I don’t even respond.
Income Warning: Someone making six figures can still have a 520 credit score. If they don’t pay other landlords, they won’t pay you.
Income alone doesn’t make someone qualified. I don’t only care what they make – I care what they pay. I’ve screened plenty of people who say they earn six figures, and then I pull their credit and it’s in the 500s. Making money doesn’t mean they pay bills. If they can’t pay other landlords, car loans, or electric companies, they’re not going to treat your house like a sacred exception.
My philosophy is simple:
If they don’t pay their bills somewhere else, they won’t magically start paying mine.
Free Background Research I Do Before Scheduling the Showing
If everything looks good, then I look their phone number up here (the phone number will either be in the email you got with their lead info, or on Zillow when you log into your Zillow account).
https://www.truepeoplesearch.com
I also look them up on Facebook – shockingly most people do not have their public profiles locked down. You will learn a lot about them if they don’t. People will post anything, even things like begging for rent money and how much they like drugs. Sometimes even pictures of their drug of choice. Probably not the tenant you want. My favorite was when one literally had a cake made with their drug of choice on the cake.
Then I check Indiana public records. Find your own state’s public records.
You will find evictions here, as well as judgements and collections, and criminal records. Do yourself a favor and read up on disparate impact and why you are not going to have blanket bans that could violate Fair Housing law.
Then I Google the person’s name and see if anything comes up – LinkedIn, strange news articles, etc. By now you should have a pretty good idea if this person is lying to you and is a waste of time. I find this whole process pretty entertaining honestly. Especially if I discovered they just left their eviction hearing 5 minutes ago and are lying about it (true story, happens a lot). Or if they have 10 previous evictions. I always wonder how local landlords made that possible.
PUBLIC RECORDS ARE YOUR FRIEND!!
The Tools I Personally Use When Prescreening
- RentRedi — credit/background checks + applications
- TruePeopleSearch.com — to verify phone number/contact info
- Public Court Portal (your state) — evictions, judgments, criminal records
- NSOPW.gov — national sex offender registry
- Facebook — yes, people overshare and tell on themselves, great resource 😂
These tools don’t replace screening criteria — they confirm whether someone told me the truth.
After All That, THEN I Schedule a Showing
So if their answers to the questions in the email are satisfactory and things seem to check out, I contact them and set up a showing time. I really don’t spend a huge amount of research time on each person – I’ve got this down to a science and could probably be a private investigator at this point.
And don’t be fooled by getting to the showing stage either – they may not show up to the showing, even after all this. I always tell the prospective tenant I will text them about an hour before the showing, and that if I don’t hear from them, then I will not be there.
You don’t need to stand alone in an empty house waiting on someone who never shows up.
Final Thoughts
Well, that’s my process! Everyone is different, but that’s what I do. Once they make it to the showing and have looked around the house, I sent them a link to apply and explain to them the next steps towards securing my wonderful house.
I will also add this, if you are a realtor then you have access to something very valuable that the rest of us don’t. And that is the Forewarn app. I seriously considered getting my Realtor’s license just to have access to it. I tried calling their customer service to see if there was any chance us common folk can get that app, they said no. If you have access to that app, you can avoid a lot of the searching I discussed above.
While you are doing all this pre-screening, be prepared for people to call you a scammer, cuss you out, act creepy and weird, threaten to report you to the Better Business Bureau because they don’t like your eviction policy 😂, etc. Finding your own tenant is not for the faint of heart, there are a lot of really strange, desperate people out there. Make sure your Facebook profile is locked down.
This process has kept me out of eviction court all these years. Prescreening is not extra work – it’s what makes landlording profitable. Inherited tenants often leave behind bigger problems – including a trashed house and expensive cleanouts.
Not saying it can’t happen to me and it probably will someday, but going through this pre-screening process will help you weed out many bad future tenants. I don’t allow anyone to apply to my rentals unless they have passed my pre-screening AND have seen the property. I do applications and credit/background checks through RentRedi – it’s $39.99 per adult over the age of 18, paid directly by the tenant to RentRedi. You are NOT going to pay for their credit and background check.
Remember this very important nugget of wisdom:
Tenant selection is key in determining if your rental will make money.
I usually have a tenant selected and a new lease signed within about 10 days to 3 weeks from the day I list a rental, unless it’s in the middle of winter, then that’s a whole different challenge. Remember, screen like your bank account depends on it – because it DOES.
Before You Ask Me Questions…
If someone gets offended by prescreening, they’re not qualified.
You will get a few angry people who pretend they can’t understand why they can’t just move right into your house without questions. Qualified renters don’t panic when you ask normal screening questions. Only the ones hiding evictions, unpaid rent, and bad credit get loud.
Ask yourself which costs more:
- A 5-minute email
or - A 6-month eviction?
Prescreening isn’t rude.
Paying someone’s rent until the sheriff evicts them is rude to your bank account and your mental health.
FAQ: Pre-screening Tenants Before A Showing
Do I have to screen tenants before I show my rental?
Yes, you should. If you don’t pre-screen, you’ll waste your time showing the house to strangers who never had a chance. Prescreening saves you from people with multiple evictions, terrible credit, and those who hope you won’t check their history. It sends a clear message: the desperate need not apply.
Can I ask for income and credit info before someone sees the house?
Absolutely. You’re not asking for proof yet – you’re asking questions. You’re running a business. Asking income, credit score, move-in date, eviction history, and about animals is normal and legal as long as you ask everyone the same questions.
Is it legal to deny showings based on my screening criteria?
Yes, as long as your criteria follow Fair Housing law. Use objective business criteria like income, payment history, credit, evictions, and landlord references – never personal traits or assumptions.
Should renters pay for credit checks before seeing the property?
Not if you want good tenants. Good tenants have options and won’t pay a fee just to look at your house, they will move on to another landlord or an apartment complex. I let them see the property after they pass my prescreening, and then they apply and pay for screening.
What happens if someone lies on your prescreening questions?
It happens. That’s why I verify income, check public court records, and look up landlords. If someone lies before renting from me, I don’t give them the chance to lie after they’re living in my house.
Coming Soon:
How I screen tenants AFTER they apply and pay for their credit and background checks.
Disclosure: This post contains Amazon affiliate links. If you purchase through them, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.
