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Very clever. Are you one of those guys who sends the overpayment back to the unknown source? Who sends money for the airline ticket to get your grandchild out of trouble? Who has someone with poor behavior and credit rent a house in your name then trash it? Or are you “paranoid” and keep locks on your credit.
I am asking a legitimate question and your answer appears to be either that you feel statistically you are unlikely to be targeted or that you are a landlord on the other side of the issue.
Adding: I usually think you give decent info john. But I hoped for more here.
No one wants to be a victim of identity theft but of all the ways to become a victim, do you have any data to suggest applying for leases puts you at significant risk? The difference between a rational concern and paranoia is the ability to link it to a risk factor.
So, this confirms that a rental application gathers a lot of identity information that is not easily available to the public. My original post was meant to reflect on how much safer it was to buy a house than to apply for rentals in terms of potential for identity theft.
The current situation is that many people are apparently becoming new landlords. Lots of non-native investors are buying the cheapest houses they can find and then renting them out. Hopefully the big management companies have ethical workers and practices. But the new guys? Who knows. To me it’s risky business. Sometimes 30 or more people apply before the landlord picks the one with the cutest little kid. Why collect dozens of applications? Why not pick the potential tenant first then use the application to evaluate their worthiness? Gathering all that data is open to misuse in my opinion.
Again, there is a difference between a rational concern and paranoia. A rational concern is when you can assess the risk based on some data. Paranoia is when you're afraid of something just because "it could happen" even though you have no data to suggest that it is happening or likely to happen. How many people have had their identities stolen by new landlords and realtors? Present some data. If you can show some data to demonstrate a significant risk I'll call it a valid rational concern.
I would consider an exception of providing a SSN if they paid the entire rent up front. It would however, be something I considered a big red flag. I don't want difficult tenants or red flags, so if I had other applicants I'd probably take them over the one refusing to provide a ssn even if the red flag paid the whole rent up front.
If someone wanted to pay the entire lease upfront in cash, I would think they are some kind of criminal or a nutjob. I want a "normal" tenant to live a normal life, pay the rent on time, and not damage the place.
So I have a few rentals and manage my own. We have a lot of ma and pa landlords in my city. Most of them will use a (and now Zillow) company that are specific tenant screening companies because they don't want to handle your private information.
So if you are concerned about it ask if they use a tenant screening company if they are a ma and pa landlord. It is okay to be concerned about it, but there are entire businesses dedicated to helping small landlords avoid having to handle that exact information.
Rentals were very hard to find by me. My hub managed to find this townhouse on Zillow. We went to check it out as soon as he saw it, it was an open house. Neither of us wanted to rent it, 3 floors with no carpeting which is hard on our backs but it was the only rental available on short notice. Our house was closing beginning of June, 2 weeks from when we found it. They were looking to rent it after that date but the agent said he could make it happen for us. He and my hub were talking for a long time, he wanted to make sure our app got right to the owner. We both had a good feeling when we left.
At some point, my hub offered him 6 months rent in advance to sweeten the pot. I don't know if anyone heard him say it but the agent called us to say we didn't get it. He ended up calling back to ask my hub if he would pay a years rent in advance. The guy we lost out to had offered a year but got cold feet. We agreed, we paid the months rent plus whatever deposit they wanted. We would give the 11 months rent when our house closed. The rental agent knew our agent so he knew we had closing scheduled.
The rental agent did everything through zillow's rental service. Hub did the rental application and provided whatever zillow asked for. IIRC, it was a one time $30 or $50 fee but then you're able to apply to as many rentals as you need to that are using zillow.
I've seen articles where in some rental markets, renters are not paying ahead, they're paying more per month in order to beat the other applicants if they really need the rental. It's not a little bit more, it's $500 to a thousand or more per month.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jackmichigan
You are correct. That would be very ill-advised if they're dealing with a phony landlord out to scam them. (And the possibility of being scammed is probably much higher than the possibility of identity theft.) If dealing with a legitimate landlord, however (and I was one for years), I would think that some landlords might welcome the assurance of being paid in full. I know of no place where that would be illegal, although there may be some places where it would be. I've had a couple of tenants trash my houses while failing to make rental payments. I would have much preferred to have at least gotten paid.
I'm seeing articles where people have been scammed. They actually move into a place, only to have the law come to ask who they are, it turns out they were scammed, the apartment they "rented" was not actually for rent by the owner who doesn't rent it out.
The owners usually have an electronic lock on the front door, one which they never changed the factory set access code. We have one on the townhouse we rented, my hub went online to get directions on how to change the code. We haven't done it yet but I think I want to go buy a new dead bolt for the back door, who knows how many people have that key?
I have not seen any identity theft articles but I have not looked for them. I don't doubt it does happen. I've also been hearing commercials for a home title lock where the commercial claims titles are being stolen with homeowners being legally evicted from their homes. I have not looked into that either to see how they're actually stealing the titles.
You are correct. That would be very ill-advised if they're dealing with a phony landlord out to scam them. (And the possibility of being scammed is probably much higher than the possibility of identity theft.) If dealing with a legitimate landlord, however (and I was one for years), I would think that some landlords might welcome the assurance of being paid in full. I know of no place where that would be illegal, although there may be some places where it would be.
It's illegal in Michigan (assuming from your username that's where you are.) It's illegal in North Carolina where I most recently rented. It's illegal in California. In Nevada, it's semi-illegal in that it has to sit in a sort of escrow account and you can't actually collect the rent. In Chicago any "security deposit or prepaid rent" requires that the landlord pay the tenant interest on it.
And its often the sign of a professional crook-tenant. They'll pay it, move in, demand it back, and begin screwing with you playing the system for as long as they can.
As a landlord, think about this: I'm offering to pay it all up front because I don't want you looking very hard at my tenant profile. Do you think its more likely that I'm worried about identity theft, or trying to hide something? Think hard about this. The average Identity theft costs $1,300. Yet, I'm willing to pay you 10 times that to avoid something that's unlikely to happen in the first place.
Not as big of a consideration, but you pay taxes when its collected, so if I pay 12 months of rent in May then you're paying 5 months extra rental income as tax, and don't get your depreciation written against it til the next year.
What is everyone else’s opinion? Sure it’s fine when it works but when your identity is stolen and your accounts are compromised? Potential for disaster.
Most ID thefts cost the victim around $1,300, and that's before they're able to claw anything back (IE, if a transaction is fraudulent you typically get it refunded.)
They're inconvenient. They're frustrating. They don't typically equate to "disaster."
It's illegal in Michigan (assuming from your username that's where you are.) It's illegal in North Carolina where I most recently rented. It's illegal in California. In Nevada, it's semi-illegal in that it has to sit in a sort of escrow account and you can't actually collect the rent. In Chicago any "security deposit or prepaid rent" requires that the landlord pay the tenant interest on it.
Interesting. Do you have a legal cite for this? Because I took a cursory look through the statutes in both Michigan and North Carolina and I couldn't find it. Moreover, any references I found in news documents seemed to indicate that it was legal. In fact, one newspaper article I read from Asheville, NC went so far as to state that it was probably even legal for the landlord to demand a year's worth of rent in advance. So I don't see how it could be illegal for a potential tenant to voluntarily offer to pay rent in advance. But I'm obviously no expert in the matter.
Most ID thefts cost the victim around $1,300, and that's before they're able to claw anything back (IE, if a transaction is fraudulent you typically get it refunded.)
They're inconvenient. They're frustrating. They don't typically equate to "disaster."
I think OP has received a fair number of opinions and really it's up to them now to determine what their preferred path is based on which risk factors they find most important (even if it does sound a bit like they had already settled on a direction regardless of what was stated here). Whether they feel ok with the financial risk of buying, the risk of identity theft with renting, the risk of handing over five figures to someone that they don't feel comfortable giving their SSN to, the risk of purchasing a house with "issues", etc, etc.
It's illegal in Michigan (assuming from your username that's where you are.) It's illegal in North Carolina where I most recently rented. It's illegal in California. In Nevada, it's semi-illegal in that it has to sit in a sort of escrow account and you can't actually collect the rent. In Chicago any "security deposit or prepaid rent" requires that the landlord pay the tenant interest on it.
Could you please provide a link or a citation? I never encountered that issue when I was a landlord, but after doing a quick review of state law I could find nothing to back up your statement. I truly have a hard time believing that the state would prohibit me from volunteering to make payments as I saw fit. Contracts can be fashioned in many ways, legally.
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