Tenant Screening for Mobile Home Parks: A 2026 Best-Practices Guide

Apartment screening is a credit-bureau exercise. Mobile home park screening is a different animal because half your applicants don't have a 720 FICO and your decision needs to be defensible to a fair-housing complaint, not an underwriter. This is what we look for and why.

Why MHP screening is different

The MHP applicant pool is broader than the apartment pool. Self-employed contractors, retirees on fixed income, 1099 sales reps, and tenants with thin or rebuilding credit are normal — not exceptions. Screening criteria designed for an apartment funnel will deny applicants you'd happily approve, and approve applicants who'll be in arrears by month four.

The right approach: weight credit lower, weight residential history higher, weight income verification differently, and have a written criteria sheet you can show to a fair-housing investigator without rewriting it on the spot.

Seven data points that move the decision

These are the inputs we collect on every park application. Skip any one of them and your decision quality drops measurably.

• Credit score + tradeline detail
  Score alone is misleading. Look at trade lines — auto loans paid on time matter more than the FICO number for this applicant pool.
• Income verification
  Two months of pay stubs OR three months of bank statements OR a notarized self-employment letter. Pick one, accept any.
• Residential history (3 years)
  The single best predictor of payment behavior in a park is whether the applicant paid their last landlord on time.
• Eviction history
  Court records, not just self-disclosure. Two evictions in 5 years is usually a deny; one with a clear explanation can be an approve with conditional deposit.
• Criminal background
  Run a real background check, but apply the criteria HUD has been signaling for a decade: nature, severity, and age of conviction matter.
• Pet declaration
  Get the breed and weight on the application. It's harder to reverse this once they've moved in.
• Stated income vs. asset depth
  For older applicants on fixed income, savings depth often matters more than current income. Don't deny a 70-year-old with $80K in savings because Social Security is "only" $1,800/month.

Staying FCRA-compliant

FCRA covers the consumer-report side of screening. The big rules: get written authorization, share the report data on request, and send adverse-action notices within 30 days of denial. Adverse-action letters need to name the agency that supplied the report and tell the applicant they can dispute the data.

Most operators trip over the adverse-action requirement, not because they don't know about it, but because the notice has to actually go in the mail and they don't have a workflow that triggers it automatically. Build that workflow.

Write the criteria down — once

The single best protection against a fair-housing claim is a written criteria sheet. Score thresholds, income-to-rent ratio, eviction look-back window, criminal-history matrix. One page, one version, applied identically across every applicant. If you find yourself making exceptions, document them and document why.