Welcome to the Underground Landlord blog here at the EDU blogs. The Underground Landlord has officially launched and is live for aiding you in tenant selection as well as a peer reviewed free tenant screening service as well.
As many of you know, real estate investing is taking the internet by storm so there is tons of advice out there from every direction. There can be multiple types of investing. Some investors buy distressed homes and fix them up to sale for a profit. We call this house flipping. This is popular especially in a booming economy.
Another real estate strategy is Buy/Hold. This is where an investor buys a home with the anticipation or renting out the property to a tenant to gain a small monthly income as well as build net value and add long term wealth. This is the type of investing I am going to focus on. This has been my strategy for over 20 years and I prefer it because it is based less on the economy and more on the overall housing need in the localized area.
There are many aspects to the rental business that can make or break you but none as much as tenant selection. This is the most important skill in managing rental property. You can get every other aspect right and fail at this particular skill and not do so well in this business. It also works in reverse. You can fail at almost every aspect of the rental business but get the tenant selection right and come out on the winning side.
Tenant selection is why we developed the Underground Landlord. This website aids real estate investors in screening potential tenants before they allow them access to their recently painted condo or freshly renovated single family home. We will give you a brief synopsis of how the website works. First thing you sign up with the contact information you would like other landlords to contact you on. We recommend in todays world, a cell phone number, text and email. Next you place all of the tenants you have had issues with in your database. Do not worry about privacy issues here, none of the tenants information is ever shared or displayed in any way.
Now as each landlords database grows, you will run searches on prospective tenants. If another landlord or multiple landlords have a tenant that matches the one you are considering within their database it will show you the landlord or landlords contact information. This puts you in contact with that landlord that you didn’t know about.
Of course this is not a cure all and there will still be bad renters. This is however another tool you can add to your arsenal to aid you in picking good and responsible tenants for your home. Also there is no charge so this truly is a free tenant screening service for your tenant selection needs.