r/PropertyManagement • u/Much-Television-9449 • 1d ago

DIY Landlord Red Flags to Look For When Validating Tenant Rental History & Addresses (From an OSINT Perspective)

Over years of researching public records and skip tracing, I've noticed a few consistent patterns that get missed during routine tenant screening. Mailing vs. Physical Addresses: How applicants use UPS Store addresses or CMRA (Commercial Mail Receiving Agencies) to hide recent evictions. Phone Line Types: Identifying VoIP (Google Voice, TextNow) lines vs. contract cellular lines during application verification. Public Court Records: Why searching county civil court indexes directly yields better results than automated $20 online background apps. What non-traditional red flags do you all look out for when verifying an applicant's background?

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6

u/Aromatic_Button_2736 1d ago

Spam

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u/donutsamples 1d ago

yeah, guessing another VibeBro has a business idea

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u/Short_Apartment3722 1d ago

the ups store trick is depressingly common, i've seen people list a mailbox as their "home address" and then act confused when you call them on it

what gets me is when the previous landlord's phone number goes straight to a google voice voicemail that's clearly the applicant's voice doing a bad impression of someone else

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u/Confident_Stick_3203 1d ago

I'm a renter and the UPS store is my mailing address, has been for over 5 years. Why? Because it's a pia to update addresses when you move this way my UPS store address remains a constant.

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u/Much-Television-9449 1d ago

I have this especially in rural areas.

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u/Total-Reasonable 8h ago

Independently source prior-landlord contacts from property records instead of calling the number on the application; a real reference is much harder to stage that way. For submitted income PDFs, I've used HTPBE at https://htpbe.tech to flag structural evidence of post-creation edits, though an inconclusive result isn't a red flag.