|
|
|||||||||||||
|
Univesco owns or controls about 7,000 properties throughout Texas and Florida. Apartment Finance Today spoke with Univesco Senior Vice President David Bower to find out how he handles background checks. CrimSAFE, from First Advantage SafeRent, categorizes an applicants past offenses such as crimes against persons, property, society and lets the property owner decide what types of people it will accept. What are your top worries or challenges about criminal background checks for prospective tenants? We ask people several questions on our application about their background. It gets a little tricky because Im not as concerned about the felony-misdemeanor [definitions] a felony can be gambling; Im not that worried about that. Misdemeanors in some places can be beating your spouse, and that worries me. There are degrees of severity. Someone with one DUI [driving under the influence] wont cause a problem. Someone with three or four probably will raise an objection. But primarily, were worried about someone who could pose a threat to other residents. The big one is sex offenders, which were very concerned about. Before you adopted CrimSAFE, what was your background check process? [Our previous system produced] a criminal report. You had the manager at the property trying to interpret it. We like the managers to manage properties; we dont want them in the crime report business. It pulls them away from what they ought to be doing. That created a number of problems that caused me to worry about it. For one thing, youve got someones criminal report and I cant [easily control] whos got access to it. It tells you if theres been an offense, and in some cryptic language what it was and the disposition of it. How did the switch to CrimSAFE go? I sat down with our [SafeRent] representative and did a lot of tweaking [to the criminal categories]. Its a fairly detailed analysis because you dont want to trap too big of a group in a certain category and wind up excluding people you shouldnt or take people you shouldnt. There were also some cultural problems [among the managers] I used to have some control and now I dont. With CrimSafe, the managers just get an acceptance or declination. The corporate office makes the decision; we lay out the parameters and the manager just puts in the information and gets the answer. That takes them out of the loop and it takes that criminal record laying around the office out of the loop, and that appeals to me. Apartment Finance Today magazine home | HousingFinance.com Home |
|
|||||||||||
|
Unauthorized duplication of articles in Affordable Housing Finance, Apartment Finance Today, or HousingFinance.com is strictly prohibited. All rights reserved and all copyrights held by Alexander & Edwards Publishing, Inc. Reproduction of this publication in whole or in part in any form, on paper or electronically, without written permission from the publisher is prohibited by law. |