What is your opinion on apartment complexes and leasing agencies?
My opinion is that this is completely reasonable. Running a credit and background check costs money whether youre an independent landlord or a huge corporation. It takes time, manpower, and you cant whip up a credit and background report for free, you have to pay a 3rd party a service fee to get the information. This is also a great filtering tool as people who arent really interested in renting wont follow through with the application process and pay the fee. Then your loss is limited to the time showing them around the unit. There is an exception, there are a certain class of scumbag landlords that use the application fee as an additional source of income. They will charge fees way above the actual cost to get credit and background checks. I use a service from TransUnion that gives me a Credit, Eviction, Court, Criminal, and Income verification service and it costs $40. No more, no less. What do I charge my applicants? $40. I commonly hear stories from applicants where they have viewed places and even applied where the fees were over $100. The landlords are taking advantage of people and pocketing a profit on the application fee. In the Denver-metro area this summer there were news stories warning people of scams where the landlords would offer a great price on a unit in popular area and require the applicant to pay the fee before a unit will be shown to them. After they pay, they are told that they were denied for some trivial reason or that the unit sought is now rented and the people are out of their money. In reality no check was being performed at all and the scammer landlord didnt even own the unit being advertised. These people pray on the most vulnerable in society and I hope they burn in he!!.