One of the biggest problems in this real estate business is knowing other people’s level of integrity.  I don’t mean whether you can trust them or not, because you can’t.  I mean, what is their basic character?  What are their priorities in life? What motivates them?  A smile and a handshake isn’t enough these days to feel confident you have a mutually beneficial relationship with this person.

Here are some of the mistakes we all make:

1. We all assume that everyone else thinks like we think.
2. We think we are protected in the corporate environment, but we aren’t, we are in a litigious environment.
3. We assume everyone tells the truth.
4. We want to like people, and we want to be liked in return.

When you do a simple, low-cost or free back ground check, this is what you need to keep in the forefront of your thoughts:

How someone does ONE thing is how they do EVERYTHING

What does that really mean?  Let’s take for example that you are about to do a real estate deal with someone that, after checking, you see they are involved in a lot of law suits.  This was one of my big mistakes, taking their history as an enjoyable level of story telling.  What I totally missed was this person was no stranger to law-suits, and yes, I was sued by this person.

Let’s say you are about to go into business on a real estate deal with someone that has been divorced 3 times.  Should that bother you?  Are you concerned?  Were all the divorces amicable?  These are the thoughts you need to have in your head when you are about to put your most prized possession (your hard earned money) in the hands and subject to the direction of someone that knows how to separate from the most intimate of relationships and either bounce back, or surge ahead.

Does that mean you need to do a background check on everyone?

YES.

And it’s really pretty simple.

STEP 1. Simple Searching

The first thing to do is a simple search of the person’s name on the internet.  You may have to drill down and add a location, but that information is easy to find.  You’ll be amazed when you come up with.  One time I found a mug-shot of someone, a newspaper story of a domestic incident at the home, etc.  I’m not saying whether this is good or bad, but it’s better to know than not to know.

Remember, this is only the first step.

STEP 2. Targeted Searching

There is some information you need to know when you start to drill down to finding the real subject.  If you’re searching for “James Smith”, that will be a challenge to make sure you have the right Jimmy.  Here are some simple criteria to ensure the information you get are really related to the actual person you are trying to know more about.

• Birthday – don’t worry about the year, the year will help, but most people will share their birthday on social media sites so they get a lot of birthday wishes.
• Location – where do they live?  Where are they from?  Where did they go to college?  The more information you can get, the better.
• Physical Description – search in the social media sites too – google plus, Facebook, etc.  Often times people have their picture and you can easily determine if you have the right person or not by their picture.
• Remember, as you search you will gather more information that can lead you to the information you want.

STEP 3. The Search

After exhausting all the free searches on the internet, and avoiding the high paying web-sites that are happy to tell you where your buddy is, you can actually get a pretty good result from a service I use at about $30/year, PublicData.com.  It’s not the most complete service, but for that price it will consolidate most of the free county sites and give you the information you need in order to start your research.  What you DON’T get is information from the governmental sites that charge a fee to get to the information.  So know the information from this site isn’t complete.

Another resource for the public (fee based, but still cheap) is Pacer.Gov.  This is a web-site that catalogues all federal courts, criminal, civil and bankruptcy, and a search in this can uncover a great deal of information about legal issues.  Remember, this is Federal only, so it won’t bring up county or city level offenses.

STEP 4. Dig Deeper

There are a couple of top notch search sites like Been Verified and more that charge a hefty monthly fee.  The good news is some of them offer free 7 day trials.  You may get more information on these sites, but I use these as a last resort.  If you really want a thorough background check, you’ll have to hire a private investigator.

Do you have someone you want me to search for you?  I go through these same steps – so the only information I can gather is the information freely available on public records.  But it’s amazing that sometimes that is all you need.

Be sure to add the name, some history, why this is important to you, location, age, birthday, etc.

  $120.00