Hi! This is Paul Kankowski with PURE Property Management, and today, I’m going to be talking about California rental applications’ process guidelines. Now, it’s very very important for your rental application that you have a process in place. You know I’ve heard some real horror stories, people just say, well I look at what their car is like. I see you know what the surrounding of how they’re dressed, those are not legal and proper ways to screen residents. You shouldn’t be looking at the car they drive and help if they have wrappers in their car or not. What you need to be looking at is concrete evidence, and you need to have the same way, so that you don’t get caught up into a discrimination lawsuit.
Here at PURE Property Management, we have a very set criteria for anyone that’s going to be running from our properties and we treat every applicant the same. We don’t care about any of the protected class situations. What we care about are the things that are important, such as what is their credit, what is their previous rental history, how many late payments have they made, what is their income, and can we verify their income? Can we verify their rental history? Those are the things that are important, not how messy their car is, and what they look like during the screening.
I have 800 plus credit, and I can tell you right now if I was going to look at a rental property, I might be in shorts and a t-shirt and just finished a run. Why? It’s the weekend and I know my credit’s good and I’m not going to go get dressed up. Someone else who has a very low credit, they might come in a designer suit that doesn’t make them a better rental application than me. They have a designer suit maybe because they owe tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt, that’s what matters. What is the situation with that? It does not matter if someone dresses, it does not matter the ethnicity, any of those things do not matter; what matters is how the person’s credit is? What is their credit history? What is the rental history?
Make sure you have a plan if you’re going to do this on your own, don’t just say oh I’ll figure it out. You need to have a plan because if you do get sued by someone who says hey you discriminate against me, you need to be able to show that you went through a process and that you have a way that you picked the thing that is legal.
Here at PURE Property Management, we have a very distinct process that deals with credit income, rental verification, late payments, some criminal history, those are the things. Everything we do that we are screening from does not look at any of the situations that are discrimination, we only look at what is we are legally allowed to look at.
This is Paul Kankowski from PURE Property Management, we’d love to help you. Have a wonderful day!
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