Criminal checks

After telling the story of Jason Winterholler, the Austin American-Statesman offers up the following: “Police said homeowners should do credit and criminal background checks on prospective tenants. They also warned owners to be skeptical of overly favorable deals and resist the urge to skip background checks just because the prospective renters seem nice.”

That advice will seem pretty straightforward to most landlords, even if sometimes it takes a lot of discipline to follow it. There are two things different here from the usual story of this kind. First, this advice is aimed at homeowners who attempt to rent out a property because they can’t sell it.

Most landlords got into the property renting business on purpose. But because of the current housing crisis, we’re suddenly seeing more “accidental landlords,” people who can’t sell their house and figure that renting it would be an option that generates some revenue.

That was Jason Winterholler’s situation. He needed to move to Pasadena from Phoenix in order to take a new job. He tried to sell his house, but the housing market was in the tank, so he decided to rent it out for a while.

He had trouble finding tenants at the rent he wanted, so […]