Free Rental Application (Handwrite-In) - David Fetterman form
hey there what's going on this is Seth from re tips here calm and in this video I'm gonna give you a quick tour of a website called cozy and one of the many things that cozy can be extremely useful for is in screening tenants before you let them live in the property that you own and whether you are just getting into the rental property business right now or even if you already have a few and you've been managing them for a while in either case I can't think of a lot of good reasons why you wouldn't screen tenants before you let them live in your property there's a lot of compelling reasons why you should be doing a little bit of due diligence and figuring out what kind of a person they are what their credit history is if they have any prior incidents or issues with the law all this stuff is really good to know just so you understand what kind of a person you're dealing with what you can expect from them and just what kind of a person is going to be living in the property that you own in this website right here cozy is really the best place I know of to get this kind of information as a self managing landlord and the great thing about it is that for landlords it's free they don't have to pay for anything all the costs for these reports are paid for by the tenant so it's not coming out of your pocket and kuusi just has a really nice easy to understand user-friendly system both for the tenant and for you as you're navigating through this process and that's what I'm gonna show you here in this video so I've got an affiliate link beneath this video if you click on that you're gonna land on a page that looks something like this and what you get here all you got to do is you can either click on get started or go down here and click on request screening reports if this is your first time on the site and you've never used it before you just gotta create an account it's really quick and easy you don't get bombarded with emails or anything like that you just need an account in order to get started with this process so go ahead and put in your email here and then you're a landlord if you're watching this so go ahead and click that and go on to the next steps I actually already have an account so I'm gonna quick migrate over to my home screen and just show you where to go once you're logged in so once you're on the dashboard of the site after you've logged in just go ahead and click on screening if you want to request a new report from somebody just go ahead and click on this button right there and when you get started ordering a credit report there's a few different things you can do here first of all if you wanted to you can just get the credit report and that's just gonna show you their credit score their credit history and what their current financial picture looks like with regard to the debts that they have outstanding and that they're paying out you also have the options say if you're not interested in the credit what you could just get a background check to see if this person has any issues that you would want to know about however it's a pretty good value if you wanted to get both it doesn't cost that much more than just getting one of these so that's what I'm gonna do right here is just click this and that'll count it in for me not only what this person's financial picture looks like but also if there's any big red flags that come up in their background check I'll know about that as well and as for the person we're gonna pull this on in order to show you what this looks like from both your perspective and the tenant or borrowers perspective I'm actually going to pull this on myself so I can kind of show you what it looks like to both people so I'm just gonna go ahead and put my information in here and the nice thing is this is literally all you need from your end it's just the person's first and last name and their email address because he kind of handles the rest which I'll show you in just a minute go ahead and put that information here and then when we scroll down here if you don't already have an account you can go ahead and create one right here personally I already have an account so I'm gonna go ahead and just sign-in I do it that way go ahead and check this and send the request okay so now that email has been sent in it's just a matter of me going and checking my email yeah let's go ahead and do that okay so the applicant is going to receive an email that looks like this as you can see it's pretty straightforward pretty easy to understand just says who is requesting the background check and credit report on them long as that person is ok with it they would just have to go ahead and click on get started and then the applicant is going to see a page that looks like this and as you can see it's very straightforward there's no mystery about what's going on they can scroll down to enter in their payment information and then just complete all this personal information and then once that's completed they would just go ahead and check this stuff and answer these security questions we're just gonna have to answer a handful of security questions just to verify our identity and then once the applicant has answered these questions to the best of their ability and they're gonna click Next to purchase and pay for these reports okay so now we're brought to this page it outlines what reports are being pulled and who they're going to be shared with and remember this is the you that the applicant is saying so they're the ones paying for these reports not the person who is requesting it so that's just an important thing to keep in mind it's actually free for the person who is requesting it and once we've got all that information and Phil then we'll go ahead and click purchase and share ok so immediately after the applicant pays for that credit report it's going to take them to a page where they can see they're on credit report and usually the background check if that's been ordered to it might say pending for a few minutes until that information gets pulled in and at this point I'm gonna jump over to a couple of examples of credit reports and background checks that Cosi will generate just so you can kind of see what a typical report might look like this right here is what the credit reports look like and as we can see from this example this score is 744 that's pretty decent I can't really tell you what metrics you need to use as far as when you should say yes or no to an applicant but I can't tell you from my experience in the banking world where we would lend you know millions of dollars to people for commercial loans the way we used to look at it was for the most part if a credit score was ever seven hundred and above that was pretty much a shoo-in there might be some tiny little issues in the credit report worth investigating but for the most part if somebody's score is you know 700 or north of that they're probably a pretty safe bet I think on maybe three or four occasions I saw credit scores that were over 800 which is pretty darn uncommon from what I've seen once the scores dip down to like 650 to 700 and there may be a few questions you might want to ask and once it goes to the range of like 600 to 650 and there's usually at least a reason or to why it's that low and the person hasn't necessarily done everything perfectly and once it dips below 600 that was a pretty major issue in terms of how we looked at it as commercial lenders it would be pretty hard to approve somebody who is that low again I'm not saying that you need to look at it that way but just to give you a frame of reference that was how we looked at it so really when you see that score that's helpful to know but that's not everything in order to really understand what's going on you have to scroll down and dig into the details of what this person's financial picture looks like from a debt standpoint what I really like about these credit reports pulled through cose and Experian is that they're actually very very easy to use a lot of the credit reports I used to look at in the bank world were ridiculously confused and they took me a long time and to really understand what I was looking at but these credit reports do a pretty good job of showing you a visual representation of what's going on so if we go ahead and scroll down when it comes down here to total monthly payments it gives you a nice little color grid illustrating what types of debts they're currently paying on so it looks like this person has more than half of their debt is related to real estate loans that kind of thing and then they've got some kind of a lease lino credit auto loan secured loan revolving charge account and credit card so they've got a pretty diverse array of different debts that they're currently paying on and their total monthly payments are five thousand thirty five dollars basically what this is telling us is that this particularly applicant better have a pretty healthy income if they're going to be able to afford to make all of these monthly debt service payments and to pay for their own personal living expenses and make the payments that they're gonna have to make to us each month so that's just something to keep in mind when we scroll down further this also tells us what their total current balance is on all their debts so they're their own about this much if they were to pay everything off today that's how much they'd have to come up with it also breaks down what portion of those debts are baked into lines of credit and auto loans and credit cards and that kind of thing let me scroll down further this is telling us about any accounts that I've ever been late and how long it's been since they've been late and any outstanding collections they have or any public records and this is looking pretty good for this person they don't have any of that stuff I know something that I did use to see quite a lot in the banking world for whatever reason people would get like these medical collections where they would Oh like 50 bucks for something and it was basically a bill that the doctor's office never really gave to them but it was still owing so this person didn't even realize they had this collection out for him and as a result it really kind of hurt their credit score and all they had to do is just pay it off to get it resolved so it is possible that you may come across collections from time to time that are pretty insignificant but if you're seeing collections that are like thousands of dollars and that's a pretty big red flag and you'll probably know this already just based on their credit score because this number up here is probably to be a lot lower if they have a lot of collections or accounts late or public records or anything like that and when we keep scrolling down this tells us the account history and I think what this is typically doing going back about seven years to tell you all of the accounts that are currently open and ones that have been paid off and closed as well the way this works on the actual report you'll get is that you can click these little down arrows and it will expand to show you all of this information for each of the accounts listed so for this one for example Department of Education that's most likely a student loan that this person has and it's got a current balance of two thousand seventy-five bucks original amount was 4500 bucks and their payment is 45 bucks and all of these green circles with a seeing it are telling you that they have been current on all those payments so they really have no history of being late on this particular loan if you were to expand to each of these you would probably see the same thing for all the other accounts that they are currently paying on or that they have paid off and closed when we go ahead and scroll down here this is also telling us some of the other inquiries that have been made into this person's credit and basically what this means is that at some point this applicant most likely applied for a loan or a credit card or something with these other lending institutions and at that point they pull a credit report on them to I can't say when somebody gets a lot of different inquiries on their credit it can actually hurt their credit score because that's telling the credit reporting agencies hey you know this person is most likely about to get saddled up with a bunch of debt because their credit report is getting run a lot so that's just something to keep in mind these credit reports can be adversely affected by a lot of different companies pulling credit reports on them so just something where this is also going to list some of their previous addresses may or may not be helpful to you but it's almost always gonna be included there and then for employment if the person is currently employed you should see that information here and this can also be helpful when it comes to verifying a person's income because keep in mind this credit report is not telling you how much money a person makes it's just telling you what their current and previous debts have been and how effectively they've been paying those on a historical basis so this really isn't even half of a picture of their total debt to income and what that looks like if you want to understand what their income is one thing you could do is get their past couple of pay stubs that they've received from their employer and that can just be used to verify what their approximate monthly income is you could also get their most recent w2 and that's going to verify what their annual income was in the most recent tax year however that doesn't necessarily guarantee that they are currently employed it just shows what their historical income has been so it's usually a pretty good indication but it's not a guarantee that they're currently employed you could also get their most recent tax return which would detail all of their taxable income and exactly what that looked like for the most recent year so those are just a few the things you can do to verify what the person's income looks like and the reason that's important is because you know to somebody who's only making 5,000 bucks a month this is a ridiculously high amount of debt to be paying on but for somebody who's making twenty thousand bucks a month this is not bad at all so that's why it's important to understand how much money they're making and then kind of factor that into this whole equation of how much a debt they've got and then when we scroll down here at the bottom it's also going to let you know of many particular factors that may be hurting their credit score so these reasons here the date that the oldest it cannot was open is too recent lack of sufficient relevant and real estate account information the total of all bounces on accounts is too high or balances on bank card or revolving accounts too high compared to credit limits so a lot of times these things can be a little petty and don't necessarily mean anything bad but it's important to see this because that could be part of the reason why this person's credit report isn't eight hundred and I will say if you ever do come across payments that are late or historical payments that have been late or collection accounts or anything like that it doesn't necessarily mean you need to automatically turn them down it could but it could also just mean you need to have a conversation with that applicant to understand okay why are we these payments late why are you currently late on this are you gonna get this resolved is this something we can expect to see from you if we take you on as a tenant or a borrower the credit report is going to equip you with a lot of information to just help flesh out the story and understand what is going on and what kind of a person you're dealing with in terms of financial responsibility so that's just a quick overview of the credit report in terms of the background check if you do pull a background check it's gonna look something like this example and hopefully on the background check you pull is just gonna show a lot of green clears right here but if there are any issues they would show up something like this and you would have to then investigate or ask questions of the applicant just to find out what's going on here and that may or may not cause you to deny that it's really up to you but this will at least let you know if you're dealing with anybody who's got any kind of a checkered past it doesn't necessarily mean you have to turn them down but again that's up to you to decide and this will kind of help you understand who you're dealing with so again that is cozy and that is how you can pull credit reports and background checks through this service it's pretty easy to use this for pretty much any purpose when you need to pull a credit report or a background check I think as long as you understand how to use this and you want to use this it's pretty easy to get this information on your applicants and it doesn't really cost you anything so it's pretty slick service definitely worth checking out again I've got an affiliate link to cozy beneath this video if you end up clicking on that and ordering your credit reports through that it will generate a very very small commission for the Aria tips your blog so if you choose to do that I appreciate your support so much and of course cozy is not the only place you get this information I just think it happens to be one of the easiest ways to get it thanks again for watching and we'll talk to you later