Bottom Line: Asset Management

Getting a grip on crime
Univesco got a more efficient process when it adopted a new tool
for performing criminal background checks.

By John Zipperer

APARTMENT FINANCE TODAY November/December 2005, Plano, Texas – Property manager Univesco, Inc., wanted to make better screening decisions when it adopted CrimSAFE this past summer.

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 applicant’s 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 I’m not as concerned about the felony-misdemeanor [definitions] – a felony can be gambling; I’m 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] won’t cause a problem. Someone with three or four probably will raise an objection. But primarily, we’re worried about someone who could pose a threat to other residents. The big one is sex offenders, which we’re 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 don’t 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, you’ve got someone’s criminal report and I can’t [easily control] who’s got access to it. It tells you if there’s 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]. It’s a fairly detailed analysis because you don’t want to trap too big of a group in a certain category and wind up excluding people you shouldn’t or take people you shouldn’t.

There were also some cultural problems [among the managers] – “I used to have some control and now I don’t.” 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.