Let's Meet up at Triple Play!

December 5, 2019

For over 90 years, SERVICE 1st has been the consumer reporting agency of choice for merchants and mortgage industry participants. From income validation, to tri-merge credit reporting; our goal is for our clients to leverage our data and efficiency assets that best position them for a successful outcome. Invoicing options, lead generation, portfolio & fraud monitoring and automated income determination are all under one consolidated platform.

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When I review a tenant screening report for a single family home rental (valuation $150K), I want to know; a) are they paying their bills on time (character), b) is their DTI under 45% (capacity) and c) do they have negative eviction or criminal history (character). The criminal history should be nationwide and include all applicable sex offender registries.

What I’ve found is the report commonly used by Southern NJ realtors does not provide me, as a landlord, the credit history to perform a DTI calculation. Additionally, it often only provides a score of some sort.

I’m not interested in a pristine/mediocre FICO score or whichever risk score is provided. Most of my tenants are days/weeks from separation or divorce from their spouse. Most of them have encountered a hardship of some kind. I would estimate this is the case for 60% of my applicants. In the case of separation/divorce, many times finances have been stressed or mishandled by one of the parties, causing the applicant’s credit history to suffer.

My goal as a landlord, or the goal of my property manager during application is to approve worthy applicants. That’s how I make money and that’s how I help house those in my community. If I don’t have the applicant’s full credit picture, I can only render a decision based upon a score.

Scores certainly have their place, and should be used as an initial “pass/fail” determinant. I leverage the SmartMove™ score in this manner – but if I have a failing score, I don’t have the tools to take a closer look at the file with competing solutions. SmartMove through Service 1st provides me a robust online platform, where I can review a tenant’s credit report, criminal/eviction reports and issue approve/declination letters.

The SmartMove platform allows me to generate an e-mail that’s automatically sent to my applicant where they can pay for the report and release the report results to me inside the SmartMove platform. Very slick!

I’d love to give you a tour of this easy to implement and simple to use tool during the show. Please shoot me a line at cknuth@srv1st.com with a few openings in your schedule while you’re in AC. Let’s make sure to meet!

All the best,

Curt