Free Tenant Screening Website – Extremely Valuable, Highly Entertaining and Long Overdue!

Posted on January 28, 2008

In the age of “Community” sites such as MySpace and Craigslist, there’s a new tool just launched that’s long overdue in the property management business – it’s called TheTenantList.com

TheTenantList.com is a free web site that allows Landlords to screen tenants by name, social security number or driver’s license number – for free! The web site tells you information like whether the tenant has ever been reported as evicted, whether they’ve ever trashed a landlord’s apartment, whether they’ve broken a lease or even if the tenant has ever called code enforcement on the landlord.

At the same time, landlords can report tenants - current and past – to the site, letting other landlords know what kind of a tenant they were and whether or not they were fair and equitable to the Landlord. There is no fee to use either of these services.

The site is maintained by landlords, for landlords, so there’s it’s only going to be as good as the data submitted. But for our business, this has the potential to be very valuable. That’s because with the exception of the cumbersome eviction process, there are very few ways to hold tenants accountable for damages to Landlords: it’s a waste of time to sue and to date there’s no way to verify that the tenant is telling the truth on his or her application. TheTenantList.com changes all this by giving the industry a way to track and check-up on tenants.

TheTenantList.com may never be 100% accurate, but it harnesses the power of community accountability (and Landlord Vengeance) to keep track of tenant-malfeasance. And since it’s deliberately unregulated, it’s not only extremely valuable for our industry, but it’s a highly entertaining read!

Check it out – www.TheTenantList.com

Peter Murphy is Co-Founder and Head Broker at Home Encounter, a Tampa-based real estate Consultancy with specialties in Residential & Rental Properties, Investment Real Estate, Property Management and Land & Commercial Properties. Murphy’s analysis of the Tampa Bay housing market is featured extensively in local media and in trade publications, including the St. Petersburg Times, the Tampa Tribune, the Tampa Bay Business Journal, the Lakeland Ledger, and the Orlando Sentinel. He has appeared on ABC Action News and Bay News 9 for his reporting on significant local developments in the real estate market. He is a regular contributor to Fox’s 970 WFLA news broadcasts and is a guest panelist on Fox 13s “Your Turn”, where he consults on local and national real estate market issues. Murphy has a B.S. in Economics from the University of South Florida and an MBA with an emphasis in Finance, Economics and Marketing from the University of South Florida School of Business. He resides in Tampa with his wife and child.

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