How to select a tenant in Florida?

The pre-selection of the tenant is carried out in the first place by the real estate agent who will collect a certain number of documents so that you can choose the best candidate at the least risk.
The agent will have to apply by means of a standard form called "rental application". In this document, the potential tenant will be asked for personal and financial information.

Personal Information

The personal information is of course the name, the family situation, the professional situation, etc... but above all his "social security number". It will be possible to do a "background check" of the future tenant, that is to say to check on the public records if he had evictions, or criminal convictions, etc...

Information on previous addresses

The future tenant will have to indicate the coordinates of his 2 previous homes. This will allow us to verify the following elements with the previous owner:

• Did he have any late rent payments?
• Why did he move? Did he have problems with his former landlord? was he evicted?
• Did he maintain his apartment, did he return it in good condition?
• Was he respectful of his neighbors?
• etc..

Financial information

Finally, the applicant will be required to provide proof of income or funds held to verify that he/she is able to meet these future rent payments.

His social security number will allow us to check his credit score, which must be higher than 600, otherwise it would mean that this potential tenant has had problems to assume these payments in the past, credit card or other debts, which is not a good sign.

Ideally, as in France, a tenant's income should cover three times the amount of the rent, but you should also check his or her debt level, because in the United States people can be very indebted even with a good income.
Once you have all these elements in hand, you can easily select your tenant with the minimum of risks.

Note that you will never be "stuck" with a malicious tenant as it can be the case in France, an eviction in the USA does not take more than 30 days.

Also note that you will not be allowed to discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, disability, family status or nationality, this is "Equal Opportunity Housing".

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I hope this article has helped you better understand how the tenant selection process works in the USA.

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Eric Amsallem, author