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Tenant Screening to Avoid Evictions: RentRisk System for Small Landlords & Investors

By November 26, 2025Real Estate Pros Show

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Show Summary

In this conversation, Rich and Angie from RentRisk.com discuss the critical aspects of tenant screening, emphasizing the importance of comprehensive analysis beyond standard credit reports to ensure landlords select the highest quality tenants, which ultimately impacts their bottom line.

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    Rich & Angie, RentRisk.com (00:00)
    found that a lot of people allow for anywhere from a 10 to 20 percent, you know, cost of doing business when it comes to evictions. And it doesn’t have to be that way. That’s the thing, because any strata of property that you have.

    even a section eight going up, mean, you can apply these standards and get a better result with your prospective tenant. And that’s what we’re trying to get across to people. And so if people know how to do it, and they don’t just, if you’re just getting the standard credit report, we use a standard credit report from Experian, but if you just use that for your analysis, you have a higher likelihood of not succeeding.

    with the highest quality tenant, you really need to get a complete picture of the tenant. it just has a huge impact on your bottom line.

    Kristen (02:08)
    Welcome back to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I’m Kristen and I’m here with Rich and Angie McDaniel. They are the owners of Rent Risk. We’re going to talk about it. It’s a tenant screening platform that serves the small landlord or investor. I’m excited to get into this. This is a very unique product you have. Thanks for being here.

    Rich & Angie, RentRisk.com (02:25)
    Thank

    you.

    Kristen (02:28)
    So you’ve built a really impressive piece of tech and it really does help people get the right tenants into their investment properties. ⁓ Can you talk about just your experience? I know you guys have started as landlords.

    Rich & Angie, RentRisk.com (02:41)
    Yeah, so Rich was in the Navy for nearly 30 years and during that time we were moving all around the country and we would buy a property and live in it for a little bit and then we would leave and go to the next duty station and rent it out and you know that’s really where all of this stems from is that experience from being landlords and having nightmare tenants and the pain we experienced from that. Yeah a lot of pain and a lot of money lost. We don’t want people to go through the same pain.

    Kristen (03:09)
    What kind of things did you guys experience?

    Rich & Angie, RentRisk.com (03:13)
    gosh, just people, you know, they stop paying rent. Tell little bit about the Florida property. Yeah, you have one of our properties in Florida, you know, the next door neighbors calling us, Angie, there’s like 10 cats in the window and you know, the tenant calling me up, they, you know, split up, they can’t pay the rent and you know, I’m on the phone, he’s deployed and I’m like, I’m on my way down there and you better have your stuff out and getting there.

    And just houses destroyed, know, tons of pets in the house and the whole nine yards. you know, we even had a property manager and that’s a whole other conversation on quality property management, but that really didn’t make a difference either. And, you know, what we really discovered through all of that is just the A, the need in the market and

    just the risk that happens to you and the amount of money that can be lost and how it impacts you financially to put the wrong tenant in a property. So we’ve a lot over those years.

    Kristen (04:12)
    Yeah, and as you said, it can really tie up time too. If people, I mean in some states it’s very hard to get people evicted or get people out.

    Rich & Angie, RentRisk.com (04:21)
    Yeah, it’s really, know, tenant screening. know, you know, we have as we have kind of shared rent risk with different investor communities and all that.

    found that a lot of people allow for anywhere from a 10 to 20 percent, you know, cost of doing business when it comes to evictions. And it doesn’t have to be that way. That’s the thing, because any strata of property that you have.

    even a section eight going up, mean, you can apply these standards and get a better result with your prospective tenant. And that’s what we’re trying to get across to people. And so if people know how to do it, and they don’t just, if you’re just getting the standard credit report, we use a standard credit report from Experian, but if you just use that for your analysis, you have a higher likelihood of not succeeding.

    with the highest quality tenant, you really need to get a complete picture of the tenant. it just has a huge impact on your bottom line.

    if you’re an investor, what it really boils down to is a mindset shift. And the biggest problem that I see among landlords is they can, especially if they’re not very experienced, they get emotionally involved. And they don’t look at it like a business. Like, OK, I have to look at this person through a business lens.

    And so they get emotionally involved and then that’s where things tend to go awry and off track. And then from an investor mindset, it’s well, like Rich said, this is just the cost of doing business. And I’m here saying from my experience of screening thousands of people for well over a decade, it doesn’t have to be that way. You can actually have a great result and you can increase your bottom line.

    Which isn’t that what we’re here to do if we’re running things as a business? We’re here to make money and not lose money. And when that first domino is tenant screening. Yeah, it’s amazing how much time and effort and I’m sure you talk to people all the time. The investors, they can find deals, they can ⁓ do creative financing packages and get people to partner with them to buy these deals. And they put all this time and energy into that.

    only then to get a sub-par tenant to go on their property. It just doesn’t make sense, right? It’s like, okay, let’s do this complete package here. And if they do that, they’ll be much happier and their investment will be much, much better protected, you know?

    Kristen (07:41)
    Absolutely, I I think this is such an interesting niche that you guys have carved out. How did you start kind of the, how did you start building the systems? How did you start knowing the right things to ask and the right processes to go through?

    Rich & Angie, RentRisk.com (07:55)
    Yeah, I’ll let Angie address that because she built the know-how behind it and then I built out the tech that supports it now. Yeah, so I mean it really like I said it stemmed from our personal experience and then as we were moving around I just stumbled into a real estate opportunity and worked for a broker in Southern California that was amazing and really learned from her and and learned kind of the basic tools and then

    Fast forward when I started my own company in Northern Virginia, my own management company, ⁓ I wanted to bring, because I saw a need in the market through our experience, ⁓ I wanted to help people and take care of their properties. that just, like I said, I care. I care about those other people and I care about their investment. So I just, you know.

    took a great responsibility on myself to make sure that they did not have the same kind of experience. I felt personally responsible. So when I look at someone, as I was screening all of these people for these properties that we manage, ⁓ I’m looking at a whole picture and I’m looking at a behavior pattern. So their credit, their income, their rental history, it all paints a picture of what kind of, what is the risk?

    level of this person. How risky is this person going to be for my client? And I was really strict on that standard. And that’s what led to the success that we’ve had over all of these years of never having an invention. think too, though, the biggest thing is Angie really developed a reputation. And I’m talking like multiple, multiple hundreds of realtors started approaching her. can you screen these tenants? And it got to be.

    a loss leader because so many people were asking her to do it. And that’s what led to kind of the… Like how can we scale Yeah, how can we scale this and get this idea out? Yeah, because I was doing that in order to grow my management company. I was serving these realtors who had the clients that I needed for management. And it just got to be, you know, where we were just being bombarded and we didn’t have the time to continue to do it as our portfolio grew. So then it was like, okay, how can we…

    How can we teach other people to have these results? What can we create? And that’s really where Rent Risk came in.

    Kristen (10:19)
    That’s so cool. mean, that’s such an interesting background. And then talk about, Rich, how you built out the tech.

    Rich & Angie, RentRisk.com (11:00)
    Yeah, so I went into tech somewhat naively because I’m like, hey, I’ll just get a developer and we’ll start building out the tech and we’ll implement this. I’ll get one of the credit bureaus on board. Well, that was an interview process just to find the right credit bureau. We partnered with Experian.

    Kristen (11:04)
    Yeah.

    Rich & Angie, RentRisk.com (11:17)
    And then you go through a whole compliance, which took a year and a half to get through compliance inspection. And that’s going through where I knew very little about the industry and the Fair Credit Reporting Act and the standards you have to comply with. And then once we got the system on, then if you know tech, anybody that’s had experience in tech knows that it’s never good. There could be a little bug or someone is doing something and.

    It doesn’t respond how you think you program it to respond. And then you always are adjusting and making it better. you respond to clients’ needs as they use it. So it’s an evolutionary process, right? But yeah, we have a great product. And we’re trying to continue to grow and respond to the, because we have our own in-house development team.

    And so we can respond. If an investor tells me, yeah, I’d like to see X, Y, or Z, we really try and respond to it and get them what they need. I think that’s one of the things that’s made us really unique and good.

    Kristen (12:23)
    Absolutely. And you guys have a lot of different offerings within the platform. So you have, you know, rep payments, insurance. I know that fraud protection is a big part of it. Can you talk about that a little bit?

    Rich & Angie, RentRisk.com (12:35)
    Yeah, so we partnered with Experian on the credit side and know data accuracy amongst credit bureaus is really important, right? And then ⁓ because.

    If you go to check your credit and you find out that you had a car loan that you paid off, but it’s still reflected in your credit report, you want that corrected. So data accuracy and reporting is very important. Experian is very high. In my opinion, they would all argue this, but they’re the best from what we’ve looked at. And then we partnered with Plaid, and we’ve done that from many different things. So Plaid.

    Works with us for an identity verification. They do You can do an enhanced screening via our platform So if you screen your tenant via us, you’re gonna get the credit report and they can upload financials but you can also go a step further and use Plaid to verify employment they can look at assets they can look at income and Yeah, so it’s it’s really giving you kind of a peek behind the curtain

    And then there’s also a tool they call Signal. And Signal is, it’ll, from fraud prevention, know, it’s looking at, you know, how long has this account been open with a tenant? You know, have they ever been flagged for fraudulent activity? And there’s, there’s other markers they look and we get a score and it’s, you can set that score low or high risk, you know, when you’re the platform owner. And we’ve set ours to where it doesn’t take much to trigger it.

    And so if we see fraudulent activity that pops up, we don’t let them transact with us. And it also allows us to look at it further. So it triggers us on our side, hey, you need to look at this account right here or look at this activity from this person. And so it just gets eyeballs on it a little bit more deeply.

    So I will tell you, I was with another very popular payment processor, and I won’t say the word, but our first we went through and set up our payments with them, and our first transaction was fraudulent. Our very first it was a sizable transaction because we have our limits. Because typically people, they’ll do multiple PayPal or Venmo or ⁓ Zelle. And those have limits set to prevent

    Kristen (14:46)
    Mmm.

    Rich & Angie, RentRisk.com (15:03)
    what we’re talking about. We have higher limits, way higher than what they do. so people almost all across the country, even in the high rent markets like DC and San Francisco, you can use our tool and people can process the payment, problem.

    Kristen (15:21)
    Wow,

    I mean these are such great offerings for people and as you said, really protecting their investments. And you kind of mentioned different states. I know that compliance is a big maybe concern someone might have for something like this. How do you guys keep track of all of that?

    Rich & Angie, RentRisk.com (16:18)
    So you get a periodic inspection from Experian because they want to make sure that if you’re a credit reporter, which is what we’re classified as, that you’re doing business as the law dictates, right? So they look at that. And so we have one of the best legal councils in the country that advises us on compliance. And we have her.

    And so she looks at our platform. She reviews the whole thing annually and then we just we make sure that that we’re good to go and each state is a little bit different, you know, right now we serve all 50 states. We’re in all the markets. You know, I can’t say that we’ll always do that if one area particularly like they plan decided to clamp down and it became real tenant friendly and but but right now we serve every market in the in the US and all our territories and so it’s it’s

    the offering is available anywhere you go.

    Kristen (17:15)
    Amazing. Well, this is really exciting. And so what kind of people are you working with specifically? Because I know there’s a whole range of people.

    Rich & Angie, RentRisk.com (17:24)
    Yeah, we’ve partnered with a lot of investor groups and live with…

    You know, that they go in the the the residential space. Some are some some have people that are in the big commercial residential offerings, right? And for the multifamily. And then we’ve you know, we have other listing sites that we’ve partnered with as well. Like, you know, and obviously I’m a veteran. So we love the veteran community and the veteran investor community. And we’ve we’ve partnered with like HRN, veteran, Veterans United Home Loans.

    military by owner listing site and and a lot of brokerages as well. So Compass and Compass military some of the subsections, you know, particularly geared to the military community. Keller Williams, we have a lot of brokerages that use our product there. So that it’s that and growing. Yeah, yeah, it’s it’s it’s growing. And, know, that’s the whole thing. I was when I told you I, you know, I formed this. was it was

    I guess I had thought it would be really easy to break in the PropTech space and it’s been more challenging, but these partnerships, particularly with investor communities, have really paid a lot of dividends for us and we’ve seen a lot of benefit and value passed on to these communities.

    Kristen (18:44)
    Yeah, I mean, I’m sure it’s a no-brainer for people. is something that can really help their investments. And you guys have had zero evictions. Is that correct? Yeah.

    Rich & Angie, RentRisk.com (18:52)
    Yeah. Yeah. So this

    this, you know, I and I can’t promise that for everybody who’s used RedResc, right. But I but I know in our philosophy, this this.

    The same thing that we do in our management where we’ve screened thousands upon thousands of people in our property management. That same philosophy is what we teach in rent risk and it’s the same tools. Matter of fact, we use rent risk now to screen for our management company. Even though we have a big one of the big name software platforms to you know, for our management company, we we do all the tenant screening through rent risk because it’s more efficient for us. We process a lot. So it’s

    a little bit more streamlined and efficient for my team to do that. But also one of the things just so everyone understands when they use rent risk within each application we walk you through what to look for. So it’s not just hey here’s the lease leasing information here’s the credit report here’s the criminal here’s all their financials. We actually walk you through okay this is what you need to look for for the in the credit report. This is the best practice for income ⁓ an income requirement. Here’s what you ask

    previous landlord and then all of that information together is going to paint that picture that I was talking about earlier of this particular person and how risky they are.

    Kristen (20:13)
    Amazing. So this is available now for anybody to use. Is it an app? Is it a website?

    Rich & Angie, RentRisk.com (20:20)
    Yeah, it’s a website that’s phone applicable. Mobile friendly. Mobile friendly. Yep. And so we could do that. mean, most people think they’re on an app when they go on their phone and they’re on the site, but they’re actually on just the mobile friendly version of the website.

    But yeah, we’ve gone through and we’ve looked at it and it looks good and it responds well. And so people can go on and they can create a free account. They can start using it, playing with it. They can also request a demo. So they can go in on our site and just say, hey, if you want a demo to see what it looks like, you can request that. And someone can schedule that. And it’s pretty easy and quick and short.

    That’s how you can check it out.

    Kristen (21:06)
    Amazing. so rentrisk.com and then how can people find you guys individually?

    Rich & Angie, RentRisk.com (21:13)
    Yes, so you can jump in. so I’m probably the most active on social media. It’s Angela Lee McDaniel on Instagram. That’s LEIGH for Lee. Or you can find me through command properties on Instagram or command properties on Facebook. Angie Phelps McDaniel on Facebook. And rent risk is trust rent risk. That’s our Instagram handle on there. And so and then we’re also on LinkedIn, you know. So but yeah, we we’re really we really hope

    that the use of this tool will get people out of the mindset that they just have to accept such a high number of evictions when they go to rent. Ideally, you want to change an industry when you come to this, right? And you want to make…

    standard and what people look at higher. So that’s our goal. We want to serve people to the highest level and really teach them and really change the industry standards for screening. And we want people to make more money and protect what they have.

    Kristen (22:15)
    Amazing. Well, thank you so much for being here. I think this is such an exciting company.

    Rich & Angie, RentRisk.com (22:20)
    Thank you. Thanks for having us. I appreciate you helping us getting the word out.

    Kristen (22:24)
    And thank you everybody for listening. Hope you learned a lot. Maybe got some inspiration for your own business. Definitely check out Rent Risk and we will see you back next time. Bye.

    Rich & Angie, RentRisk.com (22:33)
    Alright,

    thanks guys.

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