IRVINE, CA—CoreLogic's MyRental online platform screens potential single-family rental tenants for suitability based on a combination of factors including criminal history, credit history and likelihood to stay and pay, SVP Richard Leurig tells GlobeSt.com. The global property-information, analytics and data-enabled-solutions provider recently released the second generation of its tenant-screening-services offered through myrental.com. The online screening platform works with landlords, agents and brokers of single-family rentals to provide unique applicant data and scoring mechanisms to assess applicant risk and identify those renters who are most likely to fulfill their leasing obligations.

MyRentalhas been enhanced with mobile-device support and a more streamlined process for applicants to authenticate their identity. The proprietary and statistically based “Tenant Score” provided by MyRental assigns a single numerical value based on a consumer's credit information, and other relevant historical activity, such as prior lease obligation performance and previous evictions, that ranks the applicant's risk relative to other applicants. This streamlined approach to evaluating applicants is particularly useful for independent landlords who may lack easy access to data and analytics capabilities required to assess risk.

We spoke with Leurig about the issues that make these screening services necessary and how landlords should approach tenant screening.

GlobeSt.com: What types of issues arise in single-family rental situations that make these tenant-screening services necessary?

Leurig: There are a few factors that impact landlords in a small single-family-rental environment. They need to ensure they get the highest-quality tenant through the application process: tenants who pay and stay throughout the entire life cycle, with no eviction process and no collections process. They need a uniform way and fair way to assess applicants without bias to find those who are able to stay and pay, and they need to do it in a clear and consistent manner. They need to know that the person who is applying is actually the person who will be living in the single-family rental.

GlobeSt.com: What should landlords be particularly concerned about with tenant screening?

Leurig: The biggest thing is making sure you have a holistic view of the applicant—not just their credit history, but also criminal information to make sure all bases are covered. The biggest problem is that credit reports are hard to interpret and are not really predictive in and of themselves. Using our screening reports is very important and productive for the landlord.

GlobeSt.com: Aside from these services, how can landlords prevent problems with single-family-rental tenants from occurring?

Leurig: It's important that all lease obligations are understood by the tenant: those with regard to pets, smoking and HOA policies that have to be met. The tenant should be clear on those items and whether or not covered they are covered adequately by renters' insurance. It's possible to require rental insurance above and beyond the insurance the landlord is carrying on the property.

GlobeSt.com: What else should our readers know about MyRental?

Leurig: It's an SAS platform, cloud based, and there are two main components to it: one is the landlord side, where they sign up and select what products they want to use and enter the property information; the other is the consumer side, which allows the tenant to go through an easy-to-use process to apply and pay an application fee if there is one. Having an applicant pay shows a real commitment on the part of the tenant. We allow for either one in MyRental.

What's unique about MyRental is that CoreLogic developed a model that allows us to take landlord/tenant eviction information and other sources of data—not only credit bureau information—and put it into a model and provide a score. Rather than being like the FICO score, which is more indicative of past history, our score is predictive of future results, such as whether the potential tenant would go to eviction or leave without paying. Rather than the complexity of having to look through credit-bureau information to try and determine the best tenant, we try to remove that and simplify the process. The score can result in an approval or a decline. In addition, add-on services show the landlord what other properties in their area are doing for score settings—at what level they are setting scores for approval. It's like a comp or benchmark feature, which is important because many single-family landlords are not institutional investors, but smaller investors who own one to several of those properties. For them to go in and be experts on how to set those scores is not something they do every day. We try to make the product easy in order to cover the landlord and make sure they have the best tenants: those who stay, pay and are the safest residents for their neighbors.

We spoke with Leurig about the issues that make these screening services necessary and how landlords should approach tenant screening.

GlobeSt.com: What types of issues arise in single-family rental situations that make these tenant-screening services necessary?

GlobeSt.com: What should landlords be particularly concerned about with tenant screening?

GlobeSt.com: Aside from these services, how can landlords prevent problems with single-family-rental tenants from occurring?

GlobeSt.com: What else should our readers know about MyRental?

Instant Insights /

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