Mary, Matt, I have a sizable number of rental apartments in Chicago. I have done a large number of evictions over the years. Always costly when you have to evict someone in my experience. For a very long time now, I have tracked the information and outcomes on my tenants. I run their credit before they move in, currently via Transunion Smartmove. I had not had to evict anyone for a number of years up until the pandemic when the government told tenants that they no longer needed to pay their landlords and the landlords were prevented from doing anything about it. I've had six or so non-paying tenants in that period. Not too bad as a percentage, but I still had to pay the mortgages, utilities, and maintenance over that time. It has cleared now, as even before they allowed evictions again they started allowing one to obtain a judgement, and since I did not rent to tenants without reasonable credit, I was able to file and that was enough for them to leave. The point I actually want to stress is that from my database, I can see that good credit has a high negative correlation with problems aside from just not paying the rent. A tenant with poor credit is more likely to not get along with their neighbors, have damage to their apartment from unknown causes, and other negative issues. I always run an applicants credit as it is much cheaper than the additional problems one encounters when renting to a person with an unknown history. Just my experience, but I have the data that has led me to this conclusion. Rich
