If you're a landlord, and you're not using a letting agent, how exactly do you reference
a tenant?
That's coming up after this.
Hi, my name's Tony Law from Your First Four Houses, and my channel's all about helping
you achieve financial freedom through property.
If this is your first time here be sure to subscribe to my channel and click the bell
notification icon, because I've got loads of content that I'm looking forward to sharing
with you, and you don't want to miss out on any of this stuff.
So, this is one of six videos that I've put together for you, that's all designed to help
you find and keep the very best tenants in your properties.
I've broken it down into six different lessons for you.
We've got Demand, Advertising, Viewings, Referencing, Retaining and sadly, Removing tenants from
properties.
This one is all about the referencing, so it's going to start off with the employer's
reference.
So, you're simply going to pick up the phone and you're going to speak to the potential
tenant's employer.
It will only take a few minutes to do this, but you'll immediately get a sense of whether
they actually have genuinely been there for quite some time, and you can also ask how
much they're actually earning and so on, and make sure that tallies with what they've actually
put on their form.
I should take a step back here and say by the way, that there's plenty of organisations
out there that can do all of this for you, but I find that I can reference a tenant usually
within about 10 minutes maximum, so I just kind of do it myself to be perfectly honest
with you.
Next, we're going to want to get a landlord's reference.
In fact, if I get a landlord's reference from where the tenant currently is, and I'm slightly
dubious about that, because don't forget, if that landlord has had a massive issue with
this particular tenant, it sounds really vicious, but they might be desperate to get them out
of the property and into another property.
So, just be a little bit cautious when you speak to a landlord if you get a sense that
there's something not quite right there.
If you get that, I personally would then ask to speak to the landlord before this particular
one, because obviously, they've then got nothing to lose, they will be deadly honest with you.
Ask for a guarantor if you have any queries whatsoever over the nature of this particular
tenant, just ask for a guarantor, and then you're going to carry out these references,
via the guarantor.
Ask for a decent sized deposit.
I feel that if a tenant isn't able to pay you, let's say a month's up front, for example,
as a bare minimum, if they're not able to pay that, are they maybe going to struggle
to actually pay the rent?
I'd suggest maybe that is the case.
I appreciate you're not going to be able to follow that advice absolutely, in some parts
of the country, but in my part of the world on the South Coast, everybody can afford,
I've found this to be the case, my tenants have anyway, they can afford to pay one month's
deposit up front, and in my opinion, that's the bare minimum that I personally will actually
accept.
Carry out a credit check on this individual, and you need to rely on it.
There's organisations out there, you could use for example, Letting ref for example,
OpenRent, NLA, these are all organisations that will actually gladly do this credit check
for you, and it's really cheap to do, and rely on it, because frankly if you get a credit
check that comes through that's a little bit dodgy, a little bit questionable, well that
gives you a really good indication does it not?
On how they actually manage their finances.
And lastly, you've heard this one before, trust your gut.
This is going to sound awful this next bit.
Even a killer could get somebody to say something nice about them.
Oh, that's horrible, but hopefully you get the message that I'm saying there.
Trust your gut, what do you genuinely think about this person?
Because, ultimately it's your decision as to whether that individual is going to be
able to move into your house, flat or HMO.
I really hope you found that one helpful.
If you did, be sure to subscribe to this channel, and I've got a couple of other videos here
that you may well find helpful.
My name is Tony Law, from Your First Four Houses, and I look forward to seeing you in
the next one.