Credit checks for landlords are among the tools which are meant to give landlords a way of judging the financial responsibility of the people they rent their properties to, ideally before getting into lease agreements with such potential tenants.
To understand the essence of credit checks for landlords, it is important to first appreciate the harm that a financially irresponsible tenant to could cause to their landlord.
After all, most landlord-tenant agreements (also called leases) tend to be structured in such a way that the tenant lives in the landlord's property for a given duration of time and then pays later for the service so rendered to them, which essentially means that the landlord is giving the tenant the service of having them live in their property on credit; a fact which in turn gives the landlord a tangible interest in the knowing the credit history of their tenants.
But even in arrangements where the tenant first pays the landlord (beforehand) for the service rendered to them by virtue of living in the landlord's property, the landlord still has an interest in knowing the tenant's financial history, if only to avoid the often ugly situation where they later find themselves having to evict tenants who are unable to continue paying their rent, as conducting such evictions tends to be seen as a bad reflection on the landlords, portraying them as 'heartless'.
And it is the information to help avert these kinds of situations that credit checks for landlords provide.
In the earliest days, credit checks for landlords were seen as being rather too intrusive, and were therefore typically only conducted in 'high profile tenancy cases' like where the property in question was one whose rents were significantly high - or only where the landlord was essentially giving the use of the property on credit - like where the tenant was making no advance payments.
With time, credit checks for landlords have come to find widespread acceptance - and indeed, people looking for property to rent can expect to have to pay charges for such credit checks for landlords before they can be allowed into the properties (since it is the tenant who, in most cases, foots the bill for the credit check conducted against them).
Credit checks for landlords are typically included among the so called standard tenant screening procedures, which nowadays also include a criminal background check on tenants, with people who are unwilling to be put through all these checks being simply advised to 'seek accommodation elsewhere.
Of course, the fact that most landlords are nowadays conducting these credit checks for landlords goes only further to show the importance of maintaining a good credit history.
Once upon a time, the only potential harm you could get from a messed up credit report was that of being denied loans and credit cards.
But today, we find ourselves in a situation where having a messed up credit history can actually even mean being denied accommodation, thanks to measures like credit checks for landlords.