How to protect yourself against bad tenants

In Switzerland, each individual municipality maintains its own debt enforcement register, but no centralised database is available for the country as a whole. This lack of any network between the debt enforcement agencies is a godsend for bad (“nomadic”) tenants – but ways and means are available to protect yourself against the.

We often see reports in the media about bad tenants who defraud landlords, or we hear about them from property companies. Because every municipality runs its own debt enforcement register and none of all the various debt enforcement agencies are connected to each other, life is easy for bad tenants. Whenever they relocate to a new residential area (or debt enforcement district), they escape their existing debt enforcement burden and are given yet another “clean sheet”. Their troublesome past entries are completely invisible in any extract from the debt enforcement register in their new residential area. The political authorities are now keen to change this situation, and a variety of different moves have recently been initiated by politicians in Parliament. In addition, there are people with negative entries who will “improve” their extracts from the debt enforcement register in order to obtain a rental property. The consequential damages incurred by landlords are usually high in such cases. These tenants fail to pay their rent, are difficult to get out of the rental property and often leave the homes in a dreadful condition.

However, there is one simple solution that can put a stop to these scammers. CRIF holds the address histories of people who have relocated. This information can be used to collect all the debt enforcement details from the former residential areas of people who are interested in renting your property. Landlords can see at a glance whether their potential tenant has been affected by debt enforcement actions, and they are therefore able to protect themselves.