Do you need to draw up a Texas rental application form? These documents are used to learn more about a tenant before signing a lease agreement. Here, the applicant will provide the landlord with explicit consent to conduct a background check when determining their eligibility for the rental property.
In this article, we'll give you the information you need to build your Texas rental applications successfully.
Here's what you'll need to include in your application:
Texas landlords are also required to make the following disclosures in their applications:
After reviewing the credit report and other details, a landlord must provide the candidate with a notice detailing the screening criteria. Texas laws (TX Prop § 92.3515 (2019)) describe the requirements for this notice. We recommend including the following excerpt in this document:
"Signing this acknowledgment indicates that you have had the opportunity to review the landlord's tenant selection criteria. The tenant selection criteria may include factors such as criminal history, credit history, current income, and rental history. If you do not meet the selection criteria, or if you provide inaccurate or incomplete information, your application may be rejected, and your application fee will not be refunded."
According to the Federal Fair Housing Act, the following information may not be requested in a Texas rental application form, as it can be seen as discrimination:
In Texas, there is no maximum amount that a landlord may charge in the form of rental application fees. Although it's advisable not to charge an excessive amount, the landlord always has the final say in how much to charge.
Moreover, landlords might require a security deposit after approving an application. Texas state law states that a landlord is permitted to request an uncapped amount as a security deposit.
This deposit is not subjected to any specific holding or receiving requirements, but the landlord shall retain meticulous records of all security deposits he or she has received.
There are a number of checks that you might want to do before accepting a tenant's application. We'll provide more information in the section below.
In Texas, evictions are public records, so anybody may access them. However, there isn't a single database that houses all these records, so to do this search, you will need to search for the relevant database in your county.
Alternatively, you can run a comprehensive background check using DoorLoop!
As per the Federal Credit Reporting Act, the candidate must grant the property owner formal written approval before the landlord can perform a credit check using the data on the supplied rental application form.
You can include a declaration of this and a signature in the application form or produce a separate consent form.
Suppose you choose to take adverse action against a prospective tenant by rejecting their application, requesting a larger security deposit or rental amount, or requesting a co-signer. In that case, you'll need to issue an adverse action notice.
This notice is required, even if no issues were identified during the screening process.
Do you need to create a rental application without the fuss? You can use DoorLoop's editing tool to quickly and easily generate flawless documents. Alternatively, download our free form! We have a PDF and Word version that you can use.
It shouldn't take more than a handful of clicks to get your Texas rental applications created, customized, and eSigned.
DoorLoop makes it easy for you to save reusable lease templates and autofill a tenant's details into the right fields. Once a lease agreement is created and customized, you can request eSignatures from your new tenants in one click.
With DoorLoop, you can syndicate your listings on websites like Zillow, Trulia, Hotpads, Apartments.com, and others so that you can bring in prospects on autopilot.
You can also make sure you're bringing in the very best tenants by screening your prospects in seconds.