When a family member passed away a few years ago I inherited an apartment building and suddenly found myself with a new career as a landlord. It is a great job gives me a nice steady income but there are a few downsides and I had to learn them as and when they happened.

You can't trust everybody, no matter how much you want to. As a landlord, you have to protect not only your property, but you have to protect yourself and your family. It's also just as important for you protect all the families that rent from you.

A good way to protect people and property is to run a tenant background check before you rent to them. There are many types of screenings or background checks that you can run before you rent to somebody.

My personal choice is to run a tenant screening process as well as a criminal background and social security check. For all my screening processes I utiltize the services of MacDataAdvantage.com. They are a great online screening company that provide all of the screening tools and information that I need.

A tenant background check is an important process before a rental agreement is signed. Personally I would not want a sex offender living in an apartment next to a family with young children. I also wouldnt want someone who had a history of destroying property.

I know I wouldn't want someone with a known history of destroying property to live in my building either. I have also found that running a social security background check is useful. If I have someone who constantly runs out on their rent, then I'm probably not going to take the risk of them running out on me.

Let me give you an example of when running a simple background check or tenant screening has helped me avoid what could have been a bad situation. Here I had a young couple who wanted to rent one of the apartments in my building. They looked good, the application that they filled out looked good and I was sure I was going to be happy with them.

Then I run the screenings and all the warm fuzzies I had with those two went right out the window. Not only did they have a history of nonpayment of their rent, they had forfeited their security/cleaning deposit twice before for breaking things in the home and for leaving things very dirty.