The Landlord Lens - The Scary Truth About Tenant Screening

Episode Date: June 27, 2025

Think tenant screening is foolproof? Think again. In this video, we break down the hidden risks landlords face when screening applicants from outdated background checks to misleading reports and explain how even “approved” tenants can become your biggest headache. Don’t get caught off guard. Learn what you really need to watch for before handing over the keys.

A lot of major providers have actually defaulted to, if they can't 100% verify the information, sharing nothing, which is creating more and more false negatives. That's scary. So I could screen a murderer and not know they're a murderer. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. I am joined as usual by Seamus, our CEO. Hey, Seamus. John, how we doing? Doing pretty good. And today we're going to talk about a topic very near and dear to all small landlord's hearts. hopefully, and that's tenant screening. And specifically inaccurate tenant screening reports. Yeah, it's something, John, I've been talking about quite a bit recently. And you'd think with information being more widely available,

these screening reports would just naturally get more and more accurate. Right. But while information is more widely available, meaning you can hit the database of criminal records in Miami and then in Chicago and then in Portland, what's happening is legislation and actually consumer protection laws, which generally I think are quite positive, are scaring a lot of the providers out of giving over all the information. And so a lot of major providers have actually defaulted to,

if they can't 100% verify the information, sharing nothing, which is creating more and more false negatives. What's in a screening report? Well, typically when you're talking screening reports, you're talking about a credit report, criminal and then eviction. And what's in these reports often change based on what's legally available for the location of the property. I see. Okay. So which ones are different? So any number of them can change. In some places, eviction reports are legal. Some places on eviction is not going to be returned. The length of criminal records often changes. And those are the big things that change. Your availability of like a credit score is fairly consistent regardless of where in the country the property is okay. Okay. So I can trust

that the screening reports or generally trust the screening reports credit score, but that eviction and criminal, there's some legislation related to it that might change what I see. Exactly. And the provider you use, such as if you use turbottenant, we're actually going to filter it. So you're only getting the information legally available to utilize to make a decision on a tenant based on that property. So I won't see in Oakland, for instance, eviction history. Exactly. Okay, that makes sense. How does it get criminal history? So criminal, challenging, right? You have a bunch of different criminal databases all over the country at the county level, all the state level. They're not all unified. And so one of the challenges with the

criminal reports and a reason that we found that innovation has been really slow to criminal records over the last decade is a challenge is you've got to bring all of these reports together, right? Yeah. If you used to live in Portland and you racked up quite the criminal rep there, I'm sure. And then you move to Denver, your criminal record doesn't necessarily follow you, right? Despite what they say in,

you know, elementary school that your record will follow you forever. It doesn't necessarily talk to each other. Okay. Right. And so what happens because of that is if there is any, if it gets murky as to what criminal records are associated with a given person, a lot of the major providers are actually defaulting to showing no

criminal record. It won't even show like question mark next to the criminal record. Not even question mark. So because of that, false negatives are more prevalent. And that's where the major providers are incentivized to actually cover themselves, right? So they don't face lawsuits by not sharing that information that they may not be 100% certain of. Okay, okay. That's scary. So I could screen a murderer and not know they're a murderer. Exactly. Okay. Yikes.

So what's the, is there a solution here, but beyond a national database? Well, the good news is there are new companies actually popping up that are trying to innovate in this area. And the technology shift in advancements in LLM specifically has allowed some companies to actually create a higher degree of certainty on this murky data that they would be coming from a bunch of the different criminal databases, meaning they can look at a John Martin here, John Martin here, John Martin here, John Martin here, and they can pull that data together with a higher degree of certainty than a lot of the legacy providers, and then they then show that data to you. Okay. So in that case, I would screen a murderer named John Martin and I'd made an murder. You wouldn't know that they are murder.

Good to know. Okay, so there's some hope here. Very cool. Are there any specific companies you'd recommend? Well, things are definitely looking up. I'd always point to TurboTenet. We've continually tested different vendors in the industry to try to find the ones we believe are the most accurate and make changes from a product standpoint to direct there. It is really hard as an individual landlord to validate the accuracy of the software they're using, whether that's the individual provider or the actual report that they're getting. We've gone out of our way at TurboTenant to try to ensure accuracy of these reports and a partner with the best possible providers to show accurate reports. And then I think the other piece is make sure that the product you're using is able to share that report with

the tenant as well. So the tenant knows what they're seeing. So if the wrong John Martin has the wrong criminal record, there's actually a way for that feedback loop to come through and be fixed. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Good for the tenant too. Exactly. Well, thank you for this education session, Seamus. I really appreciate it. It was fun, John. So fun. He hates me. Hello, darkness, my old friend,

I've come to talk with you again. Because a vision softly creeping, left its seeds while I was sleeping. TurboTenant is the all-in-one platform for landlords to manage their rental properties. From vacancy to tenancy, we have you covered with industry-leading tools and expert advice. Landlord Better from anywhere for free at turbotenant.com.