Negotiating Advice with Bulk Background Checks

There are three main types of individuals searching for a service that offers bulk background checks.

1. Hiring managers
2. Property managers or landlords
3. Lenders or banking professionals

If you’re in any one of these groups, this post will guide you in assessing your leverage and purchasing power for background checks. Let’s first organize our thoughts to guide you through your decision-making process.

Table of contents for bulk background checks

• Who is RentPrep
• Volume needed for bulk background check discounts
• Price break comparison
• What to know when buying background checks in bulk
• Factors that will affect your price
• Compliance and background checks
• Where to start?

Who is RentPrep?

We are a national background check company serving landlords, property managers and real estate professionals. We offer industry-leading accuracy and support through our hand-compiled background check services. We are considered a Consumer Reporting Agency (CRA) and abide by all laws and regulations laid out by the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

Volume needed for bulk background check discounts

The amount that a consumer reporting agency (CRA) is going to discount your background checks will largely be based upon your monthly volume.

Every business is different so we can’t speak for all companies. For a property manager, we typically ask them to have at least 50 rental property units to be considered for our volume discounts. To be considered for volume screening discounts we’re looking for 5-10 reports per month.

This is a starting point for our discounted background checks. We also work with hiring managers of larger companies. At a minimum, if you’re running 5-10 background reports a month we will work with you on creating a package that fits your needs with your volume considered.

If you’re running 50 reports or less a year, most businesses will direct you to their standard pricing. If you’re interested in a custom quote, just fill out this contact form and we will get back to you within one business day.

Price break comparison

Here’s a screenshot of the standard and advanced packages we offer to a property manager who qualifies for our wholesale pricing.

These exact same packages listed on our pricing page here at RentPrep are just about double the price listed above.

Our overhead is lower when working with one client who purchases 100 background checks versus 100 clients who purchase 1 background check each.

This allows us to pass the savings on to our client. Keep in mind that these are our most basic packages related specifically to tenant screening. For pre-employment screening, we tend to create custom quotes because packages tend to be tailored to the needs of the business.

What to know when buying background checks in bulk

We all have a general understanding of food and how much it costs. Let’s break down a background check into an analogy using this burger.

For you to buy and make one burger it’s pretty expensive. You’d have to buy a roll, a head of lettuce, a tomato, a burger, some cheese, and condiments. For you to buy and make six burgers your price per burger will start to go down due to economies of scale.

A background check is a lot like a burger but instead of different food types, you have different data types. We buy data such as bulk criminal background checks, eviction records, sex offender searches, global homeland security searches.

Every time we perform a search we get charged a fee. The cost of that fee varies based on the type of search and our volume of searches per month. It doesn’t make sense for you to shop in bulk and buy 100 hamburger buns because you’ll waste more than you’ll use.

For us, we can shop in bulk to drive our data costs down and that’s why we offer bulk discounts to higher volume clients. The more reports a client runs per month the better our chances of achieving a better tier of pricing on our data.

Take a look at your records and figure out what your monthly numbers are. If you’re running 5-10 reports a month it’s not unreasonable to seek out a discount on background checks. Someone who is running 100 reports or even 1,000 reports a month like some of our clients do, should be receiving a volume discount that is better.

Not only do we gross more dollars from a high volume client but we also lower our data costs due to their high volume.

Factors that will affect your price

There isn’t a lot to unpack here. We’ve already shown why higher volume clients can get bulk discounts. You should be aware of the fact that different types of data come with different price tags.

A bun isn’t the same price as a burger. In the same token, a global homeland security search (terrorist watchlist search) is going to be cheaper than a criminal search. Some searches occur on the state level while others are national searches.

We recommend staying away from any service that offers a choice between the two.

Reason being is that the difference in price between a state search and a national search is usually pennies. That’s why we only offer nationwide searches because someone up-charging a dollar or more for a national search is gouging their customer base.

We also offer verification calls along with full credit reports which require our client to go through an onsite inspection.

Compliance and background checks

A background check contains a lot of sensitive information on your applicant. That’s why there are laws in place that regulate the dissemination and storing of these files.

Part of the reason we will only do pre-employment background checks in bulk is it usually indicates that there is a human resources or hiring manager involved. This ensures that our client is following all proper rules and protocols.

The FCRA (Fair Credit Reporting Act) was created to promote the accuracy, fairness, and privacy of information in the files of consumer reporting agencies.

We are a consumer reporting agency (CRA) and we take this very seriously. We hire and train FCRA Certified Screeners and we also hand-compile many of our reports.

The reason for this is that the databases are known to have errors, omissions, and false-positives. We research and cross-reference all the data we receive in order to catch any errors in the database.

A 2015 FTC Study found that 23% of consumers found at least one error in their credit report. It’s an unfortunate truth in this industry that there are a lot of errors and misinformation but we do our part to correct these before they reach our client.

Where to start?

We’d be honored to be your background check provider…

… but if we’re not the right fit we would be just as happy to push you in the right direction. Rich Fronczak handles all of our corporate clients and can work on a quote to suit your needs.

You can enter your information above or enter your information on the contact form here. Or, feel free to email him at rich@rent-prep or give our office a call at 1 (888) 877-8501 We will give you a fair and honest price based on what our hard costs of data are.