How to Verify Rent Payment History

Confirming a history of occupancies and rent payment is much trickier than it needs to be. When verifying a potential tenant's background, the first thing you should do is look for any previous listings where they have lived. You can find this information by requesting references from their former landlords as well as contacting the management companies that own them to ask about past issues with missed rent payments or evictions. Making those calls and getting those assurances is critical.

Though, what is it that you really want the assurance of? The answer is simple, you want to confirm that the rent is going to be paid. To confirm this, you’ll need one question answered... The question being: How can you verify a history of rent payment? At VeriFast we’ve asked ourselves this question, and came up with another solution: looking at the transaction history.

VeriFast confirms rent payment history in a completely different way. Sure, you could call up previous addresses, or seek past landlord references. That does work at times, but guess who has the best, most up to date, and accurate portrayal of rent payment history? Easy: The bank account the payments were made from.

VeriFast uses verified transactional data from the applicant’s bank account to confirm that the last year or more of rent payments were made. Seeing that history of transactions listed out is a complete way to inform you if the tenant you're screening is making their rent payments at their current residence. With that kind of data, you do not need to worry about the tenant moving into your rental with an unknown, or even worse, a history of nonpayment. This is critical and game changing to your tenant screening process.

For example: If you screen a tenant with one VeriFast’s reports, thinking they’ve been at a residence for over a year or more, but the rent payment history only shows 6 months of payments, that’s your cue to start asking hard questions. From there you can establish a much clearer understanding of each applicant's history.

Ultimately you can put to bed an approach to confirming rent payment history which amounts to a “hope for the best'' strategy. Start getting the assurances you need to protect your investment property and most importantly yourself from unnecessary struggles like missed rent payments and eviction proceedings by using VeriFast’s Bank Check Reports.

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