As real estate investors, when you rent units to tenants it is common practice to run both a credit and a criminal background check so that we know who these people are before we give them the keys to a unit. What we may not consider though is just how hard it is for those “innocent” people that have big black marks on their credit reports to get it fixed and move on with life. We tried to do some online research about who to turn to for help, what to do and what not to do and what the typical process is and the information is mind-boggling.

Google “credit repair” and the entire first page is dominated by sites that are either dedicated to credit repair or improving credit scores. The only site that seems not to be completely self-serving is from the government, but try to understand what they are telling you to do and how to do it and you may be even more lost.  This 60 Minutes story truly brings to life how hard of a problem this is to deal with.

Why should we care? After all, it’s not our credit score that’s affected and we don’t want to rent to someone that seems to have a history of not paying their bills. Because we may be missing out on some great tenants, simple as that. Those people that may have a poor credit score may just be as confused as we were by all of the information out there that they don’t know where to turn so they just continue to try to continue on with a poor credit score.

If you are going to rent to or consider these people as a possibility for a rent to own program, have you thought about connecting them to a reputable credit repair service and building a completion of their program as a term of the lease?  Would you even know where to turn to do this? We have a network of reputable credit repair companies that can help. Just reach out to us and we would be more than happy to give you some references.