The tenant screening report that cost you the apartment

Being turned down for an apartment with clean credit reports is a common and baffling experience. The explanation is usually that the landlord was not looking at a credit report.

Rental history is its own category

15 U.S.C. § 1681a(x) defines a nationwide specialty consumer reporting agency as one compiling and maintaining files nationwide relating to, among other things, “(2) residential or tenant history.”

A separate file, held by companies you have not heard of, consulted at exactly the moment it matters, and invisible unless you ask.

What tends to be in it, and what goes wrong

Tenant screening reports typically pull together eviction filings from court records, rental payment history, and identity and criminal record data. The characteristic failures follow from where that data comes from:

Eviction filings, not eviction judgments. A case that was filed and then dismissed, settled, or decided in your favour is still a court filing. If the report shows the filing without its disposition, it reads as an eviction to a landlord scanning quickly.

Someone else’s record. Court records are indexed by name, and the matching problem is the same one that produces mixed files. See when someone else’s information lands in your file.

Stale status. Nobody monitors your case for changes. If a judgment was later vacated or satisfied, the file reflects whenever it was collected. See judgments, liens, and bankruptcies.

Old filings. Section 1681c(a)(2) excludes civil suits and civil judgments that, “from date of entry, antedate the report by more than seven years or until the governing statute of limitations has expired, whichever is the longer period.” An eviction case is a civil suit. Check the date of entry against that rule.

A balance disputed with a former landlord reported as an owed debt.

Your rights are the same

This is the part that is not obvious. A tenant screening agency is a consumer reporting agency. Everything in this section applies:

• A free annual report. Section 1681j(a)(1)(A) reaches the specialty agencies, and § 1681j(a)(1)(C) requires each to maintain a streamlined request process including a toll-free number.
• A free report after adverse action, within 60 days, under § 1681j(b).
• An adverse action notice under § 1681m(a) if you were denied based on the report — naming the agency, which is how you find out which file to request.
• The full reinvestigation machinery under § 1681i — the 30 days, notice to furnishers, review of what you submit, and the results notice.
• The obsolescence limits in § 1681c(a).

What to do when you are declined

1. Ask which company screened you. A landlord or management company can tell you, and an adverse action notice is required to name the agency.
2. Request the report from that agency — the free copy after adverse action if you are inside 60 days, otherwise the annual entitlement.
3. Read it against the court record. If an eviction case appears, look it up in the court’s own file. Dismissed, settled, vacated, and satisfied are all different from a judgment against you, and the court record is the authority.
4. Dispute in writing, with the certified or file-stamped court document. State the case number, the court, what the report says, and what the record shows.
5. Ask for the description of the procedure if it comes back verified — § 1681i(a)(6)(B)(iii) and (a)(7), due within 15 days of your request.
6. Keep everything. See building a record that holds up.

The timing problem

Apartments do not wait 30 days. By the time a dispute resolves, the unit is gone.

Which is an argument for doing this before you need to rent. The free annual report exists, it costs nothing, and finding a wrong eviction record in a quiet month is a completely different experience from finding it three days before you have to move.

If you have ever been party to a landlord-tenant case — even one you won, even one that was dismissed — checking your tenant file before you next apply is the highest-value hour available to you.

We do not tell you whether anything in your file is wrong or what any landlord may lawfully do. What is general: this is a separate file with separate agencies, you are entitled to see it for free, and almost nobody looks until it has already cost them something.