How To Vet A Person Before Renting Out Your Luxury Home

Renting out your luxury home, whether on a full-time basis or for vacationers when you’re not there, is a great way of making passive income. If you have more than one luxury home around the world, it can soon become the ideal side-hustle or even your main means of earning money. And while managing rental properties has its downsides, you can hire someone to do that for you if you factor that into your rental price.

However, the biggest pitfall of renting out your luxury home is that you may get stuck with some truly terrible renters. The last thing on earth you want is for someone to start exercising their squatter rights or for careless youths to wreck your space.

This is why a background check is so important. For the best background tests, check out here. This is what you should be looking for.

Credit score no-nos

You can’t judge someone by their credit score. Often, their bad credit comes from a particularly tough time in their lives and you can and should empathise with them. Then there are people with no credit background. They’re usually young and only starting their working life. It’s perfectly understandable why they have no credit score.

However, while landlords should definitely at least consider renting to people with bad credit, you’re renting out a luxury house. Unless the person can prove somehow that they have money to spare, you shouldn’t settle for someone who may be unreliable. To grow their credit score, they would be better suited to starting with something more reasonable.

Criminal history

Businessman behind bars feeling guilty

I’m a big proponent of second chances. In fact, I believe people deserve as many chances as they are willing to take. As long as they’re still striving, they are as human as anyone else. And so I don’t believe a criminal record should be an automatic disqualifier. This is where you need to go into specifics.

Take their actual crime into account, as well as their age at the time. Was it a violent crime, or was it petty theft when they were twenty? Did they do it because they felt they had no choice or were they just looking for cheap thrills?

You don’t owe anyone anything, and you should certainly set your own limits when it comes to ex-convicts. However, I encourage everyone to see a criminal past in its context.

Rental history

Of course, the most significant factor in their background check is their rental history. How have they behaved in the past with other landlords? Did they pay rent late or vandalize the property? Were they causing trouble with the neighbors?

Again, context is all-important, and the way someone acts when they are just out of school is different to how they’ll act in their late twenties. Consider this before disqualifying them out of hand, and ask them about the incident(s) that occurred with past rentals.

Since you are renting out a luxury home, you can have high standards. You’re not denying anyone a basic place to live, after all. However, consider the person’s context before writing them off.