Do Landlords Really Look Into my Background?

By Tenant

As part of Fair Housing, most landlords would do background checks but the degree would depend on their discretion. From a landlord’s point of you, they want to make sure that they are only renting to the best tenants around. This process of screening would also be beneficial to the community because somebody who passes on all background checks pose little or no harm to the community; thereby fostering a peaceful tenant to tenant relationship.

I personally think that this is great because I don’t want to live with drug dealers or with anyone who has a relatively new criminal offense. It’s okay if the record of offense is years old and because the chances of a recur decreases significantly with time. But I cannot accept to be next-door neighbor to someone who might go back to his old ways any minute.

So what are the common kinds of background checks done?

• Financial and rental history – here, the landlord would check your credit score, your current employment status and would also look into previous evictions. Previous evictions are reflected in your credit score and they would influence a landlord’s decision but more towards not renting to you.
• Criminal history – this includes databases for registered sex offenders. This is actually very common in areas with high crime rates. Apartment buildings who do not look into the criminal history of their tenants end up with really bad reputations as they tend to attract addicts, identity thieves and perpetrators of domestic violence and so on. These places get raided a lot and the rent collection is very low.
• Identity trace – your landlord would also want to know if you have aliases, multiple personalities and so on because that establishes your trustworthiness as a tenant. Also, you will be entering into a lease agreement so your landlord needs to make sure that he has the right name and information on hand.

In some apartments, the setting is that you would have to pay a holding deposit while landlords run your background check. The holding deposit is like an assurance to them that they are not doing the background check for nothing. After all, these checks cost them good money.

Meanwhile, there are other landlords that would ask for a security deposit while they’re doing the checks. Now you have to be careful because a security deposit should always be refundable. If your landlord tells you that it is not, then you should file for a complaint. That’s what I did.

So I signed some documents which basically mean that I contest to a background check and then paid my security deposit. But then the landlords decided not to rent the apartment to me. The problem was, they won’t give me my security deposit back. So I went ahead and filed a complaint with the RPA. This was the link I used, by the way, http://www.rentalprotectionagency.com/complaint_center.php. And then they just took care of the rest.

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