Background checks on hosts and guests

I do mild background checks on people sometimes. If a guest doesn’t have verifications, or are new or I just get a gut feeling, I may check to see if they’re on facebook or iG or linked in, but like someone said, that doesn’t guarantee anything, just maybe gives a little piece of mind.

As a landlord, I once rented to an alcoholic who then tried to squat in the property. We paid her to leave to avoid legal hassles. She had excellent references and a normal looking online presence. You really just never know with some people. A nefarious guest can be quite stealth.

Note: some states marry traffic and criminal records, so an inexperienced reader can confuse the two. I had this happen for a job that required an extensive background check. It stated that I had a “criminal record” in another state. It was a seatbelt ticket from 1994, when I had been visiting family out of state and we al piled into my sister’s car, but that state couples traffic and other offenses together. The prospective human resources division could not decipher this information as lay people. I got the job, but we had to settle that first, which I found interesting. So a criminal record, especially one gleaned from a public online source, may not be that at all.

Regardless, sorry that bad guest situation happened to you.

Online court records were helpful when my upstairs was an apartment. You don’t want to rent to folks that have prior evictions or who owe unpaid judgements, especially for child support or court fines.

Good luck! Your host agreement requires mandatory arbitration.

We now have to run our own background checks on our guest due to a new city code. Does anyone know what happens if we need to cancel a guest that Airbnb passed through but our check makes it so that they can not stay at the property?

I don’t know of any other city requiring this. Does the city require you to cancel the guest? If so then you should be able to do this without penalty. You’ll need to contact Airbnb.