Tenant Application: Fill & Download for Free

Node.js is pretty well orthogonal to multi-tenant applications.There are good ORMs in Node that your can leverage to help you with multi-tenant queries. I've been using Sequelize, for example, and a quick search finds:sequelize-tenant-protectionAnd there's this:Errorname/prisma-multi-tenantI can't say that I can compare the above to what's available in Java, but there absolutely is support for multi-tenancy in Node.

I could write an entire book about one “tenant from hell” we had. But here’s just one quick anecdote:The tenant had a 12-month lease. He’d already jerked us around in April (the lease expired in June), giving notice that he wasn’t going to renew. That was OK. Then in May he said he’d had a change of heart; could he renew for another year? We were suspicious, but as an attempted favor to him we agreed. (Turned out he’d been house-hunting and hadn’t found anything.) So the lease was extended through next June. In October, he announces he’s going to be moving out. (He’d finally found a house.) But not to worry: He’d placed an ad on Craigslist and found someone willing to “take over the rent.”That’s not the way we searched for tenants. We had a property management company that had a process in place that screened tenants. Then we would review the tenants’ application to make sure that, in addition to the property management screening, everything was good for us. Our present tenant was trying to circumvent this entire process by placing someone we hadn’t screened . . . hadn’t even met or talked to . . . into our property. And keep in mind: We had absolutely no information at all on the tenant—income, rental history, criminal history, credit history, reports from previous landlords. Nothing. Just that our current tenant had found him on Craigslist.We said no.Whereupon our current tenant says/claims that the Craigslist applicant was a member of a protected class (perhaps based on race, but we didn’t have any idea) and was going to sue us for discrimination. (Just as a side note, we’ve rented to Blacks, whites, Asians, straight males, gay males, straight females, lesbians, gay couples, straight couples, families, single moms, and others.)We firmly said no. We were never sued by the Craigslist applicant.

So I have had this happen a number of times, usually totally non-responsive (they don't answer phone or email inquiries). I even recall a couple of large apartment complexes where I spoke with some employee there, but they could not locate the records! And I had the tenant applicant's credit report showing address history with the applicant residing at those places!Before answering what to do when a landlord is unable to provide verification of a tenant applicant's rental history, it is first enlightening to see how one - namely me - would go about getting the tenant applicant's rental history.So as a landlord evaluating a tenant applicant's rental history, I start with two things - the written history the applicant has supplied as part of the application paperwork, and the credit report's address history. I first check to see whether they are matching; often a tenant applicant will not disclose a prior residence where the landlord is likely to speak unfavorably of the tenant. And if I have an eviction report with addresses, I will add those to the list and I will start with those, because if I can verify a prior eviction that might be reason for automatic rejection - it cuts out a bunch of potential effort.Armed with a list of addresses, I then go to the county records to attempt to identify the property owner at the time that this tenant applicant resided there; properties do get sold, so the latest owner might have no record of the tenant (but might be able to put you in contact with a former owner, in the event that ownership history is not readily traced otherwise). If I get a bit of luck, I now have an owner and the owner's mailing address (where tax bills are sent is usually what you get).At this point I will verify any information supplied by the tenant applicant with what I have discovered on my own, in order to get a measure of the tenant applicant's honesty. Nobody likes to deal with dishonest people.With the owner's information, I attempt to track down a phone number for the owner independently of any phone number the tenant applicant may have provided; this is really important to do so as to not be scammed by a tenant applicant who is giving a fake number (one for a friend of theirs) where you will only get information favorable to that applicant. I then check whether the tenant's application gives a phone number that matches to the number I found independently; if it does, the applicant scores more points for honesty.So at this point, I have either found the owner's phone number on my own, or I have to rely on a phone number that the tenant applicant has provided; if I am going to use the phone number supplied by the tenant applicant, I will do a reverse lookup on that phone number first, to see what information I can gather that way. That phone number could even be on an active online ad (maybe for an available rental unit even).EDIT: The question came up on how to perform the reverse phone number lookups. Here is a resource for cell phone lookups that I came across since I posted this answer:National Cellular DirectoryThat page will list one hour each weekday (it changes from day to day so you have to visit / follow that FB page) where they will allow you to do a lookup for no charge. For a landline, I tend to use whitepages dot com: https://www.whitepages.com/reverse-phoneSo time to make a phone call to somebody; if I use a number I found, I am fairly certain I am dealing with the property owner; if I am using a number supplied by the tenant applicant, there could still be some doubt as to who it is that I will be calling, so some carefully chosen questions are put forth to the person on the other end of the phone in order to ascertain whether this could be the actual property owner or not.Perform the above procedure for any and all addresses found for the tenant applicant's prior residences.And after all that, with a bit of good luck, the tenant's rental history can be verified. Maybe not for each prior address, but at least for the majority of them.So with all of that going on, there are a number of points in that procedure where a failure could occur. Which brings us to directly discussing the question that was posed.There are some goofy things I have found. More than once I have seen the tenant applicant's credit report contain non-existent addresses; if all other info from the prospective tenant's application was honest, I look to see whether those addresses were mistakes made by the creditor where that applicant was seeking to obtain credit - yes, this happens, for example sometimes handwritten characters on the paperwork get misinterpreted, sometimes data entry errors happen. I tend to toss out bad addresses for otherwise honest applicants.In any case, if you have an otherwise honest applicant, you can ask the tenant applicant to provide some evidence of proof of payment of rent; after all, this is the biggest thing impacting the decision to accept an applicant (although there are other behavioral things that a landlord might also give input on, you won't get that from a non-responsive one). Maybe there are money order records, cancelled checks, even ACH transfers from tenant to landlord. Not as good as getting that from the landlord, but sometimes that's the best you can do.Whether you are a landlord or tenant, how to proceed is somewhere in all of that.