First time landlords beware
So, you can’t sell your house and you think renting it out would be a good way to cover the mortgage payment while you wait for the market to come back from the dead. Maybe you’re right. Just make sure you know what you’re getting into.
The Whidbey News-Times just ran an article on the perils that may await you. They titled it “Rental Nightmares“. Here’s an excerpt.
Renting out one’s property can be a positive experience, ultimately building equity for the owner and providing cash flow. It can also be a doomed game of craps.
Before you take the plunge, do some basic analysis. Too many first time landlords figure that there’s a big payday in renting. Very often there’s not. Be sure you consider all your costs, including the costs of taxes, fees, renting out the property, maintaining it, and the costs of any potential legal action, including eviction.
If you still want to go ahead, I suggest you use a property manager. First time landlords often try to manage their property themselves, sometimes from a distance. That’s usually a bad idea.
A good local property manager can help you make sure that things are done right and that your property is looked after. They have experience in all the things you’ll need to learn about. Here are some of those things.
You need a solid, enforceable rental agreement or lease. It must conform to local laws.
You need a process for attracting, screening, and selecting tenants. It should include both a criminal background […]
Background checks help prevent workplace violence
Workplace violence statistics are hard to come by because they’re scattered all over. But we know it’s serious and we know that you need to act to help keep your employees safe and keep yourself out of court.
Here are some statistics from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) and the U.S. Department of Justice for the United States.
There were 1.7 million violent workplace victimizations every year between 1993 and 1999. That’s the last year, sadly, that we seem to have comprehensive statistics.
Workplace violence accounted for almost a fifth of all crime in the same period.
Every week, 20 people are murdered and 18,000 are assaulted while they’re at work.
Homicide is the leading cause of death from occupational injury among females and the second leading cause of death from occupational injury among males.
I don’t know about you, but I find those numbers both startling and disturbing. The people who work for you are at risk if you hire someone who is violence prone and that person attacks, injures or kills someone on the job.
You’re at risk, too. If you hire someone who kills or injures another person at work, you could be sued for negligent hiring.
To help keep everybody safe, make a criminal background check a part of your hiring process for all employees. Scour the report for warning signs of potential violence. It’s one of the simple things you can do to keep your people safe and keep yourself out of court.
Use background checks, but follow the rules
There’s an excellent article at In-House Counsel titled: Conducting Employee Background Checks: Navigating Current Rule. Here’s the lead.
In recent years, an ever-increasing number of employers are conducting some form of background checks on job applicants and employees. In fact, in a 2004 study, the Society for Human Resource Management reported that 96 percent of human resource professionals indicated that their companies conduct some form of reference checks on prospective hires. That number nearly doubled from 51 percent less than a decade ago.
This is an excellent article and one that you should follow the link and read. It’s the sort of article you may want to print out for reference. It’s filled with details about particular situations and the laws in individual states. I won’t try to summarize an article this rich, but I will highlight some important points.
The reason you do criminal background checks is to protect your business and your employees. As the article says: “employers could face negligent hiring claims if they hire someone with a criminal record.”
Some organizations are required by law to conduct criminal background checks. The article says that commonly includes “those involved in child care, health care, elder care, education and those who work with other ‘vulnerable populations.'” You need to know if you’re required to conduct criminal checks.
Whether the law requires you to conduct criminal checks or not, you have to follow the rules about what you can do and how you can use the information you get. State laws […]
Start with the basics
The Christian Science Monitor says that “More companies are using sophisticated background checks to root out lies on résumés.” What does that mean?
Well, it depends on what you mean by “sophisticated.” Most of the checking is pretty basic stuff. Here’s a quick review of some things you can do.
Start with a pre-interview phone screening. I like these because they’re a very time-efficient way to clarify facts, identify issues for the interview and get a “gut sense” of the applicant.
Not every company does it this way, but I think you should do some basic credential checking before you bring a candidate in for an interview. It’s easy to verify if appropriate professional credentials are current and check to see if the applicant actually received the degrees he or she is claiming.
If you find a problem, tell the applicant. While education and professional credentials are easy to fudge, it’s also possible that you got bad information.
Prepare for your interview. Know what you want to ask. Establish how you’ll verify competency. Some companies do a pre-employment credit check here and use the information to cross-check dates and other information on the resume or application.
Once you’ve conducted the interview, you should have an idea of whether you want to go further with an applicant. If you do, it’s time for a criminal background check and a pre-employment credit check if you haven’t done one already.
Both of those should be part of your due diligence in hiring. The entire process should verify that an […]
How much do applicants fib?
Your mother may have told you not to lie, but evidently some of the people sending out resumes never got that good advice. Several surveys indicate that lots of people lie when they apply for a job.
One screening service used by employers reports that in 2006, 41 percent of their background checks turned up a discrepancy between what the applicant provided and what the reference reported. Another report, by a different company, found “major misstatements” on 42 percent of the resumes.
More than half the hiring managers polled by CareerBuilder said they found a lie on an application. Of course, only 5 percent of the applicants admitted to falsifying information, though, in another survey, about half admitted to “resume padding.”
If those figures are accurate, then almost half the resumes you receive will have factual errors on them. That’s reason enough to check references and backgrounds.
Applicants lie about a lot of things. According to a survey by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), the most common “fibs” were the following.
- Inflated titles
- Inaccurate dates to cover up job hopping or gaps in employment
- Partially finished degrees presented as completed
- Inflated education or “purchased” degrees that do not mean anything
- Inflated salaries
- Inflated accomplishments
- Out and out lies about specific roles and duties
The bottom line is that applicants fib a lot. Many of them may not understand the difference between “presenting themselves in the best light” and lying. But that’s no excuse.
And some are hiding something serious they don’t want you to know about, like a criminal […]
One more way your rental property can get trashed
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 he was thrilled when a couple showed up who didn’t haggle over the rent and paid the deposit in cash. He took off for his new job feeling like he was lucky. Far from it. It turns out that the couple was up to no good and Jason’s house got […]