What Your Landlord Hears May Hurt You
Your landlord is sharing information about you. How does that make you feel? Modern Americans have had to live with the burden of inaccurate credit records from the three major bureaus (Equifax, TransUnion, and Experian) for generations. Research indicates that as much as 40% of the information on a random credit bureau report may be outdated, incorrect, or misattributed to the wrong consumer.
Your rental history may equally contain false and misleading information. And like credit bureaus, the national tenant reporting agencies make it extremely difficult for you to fix the information in their databases. For some renters, even false evictions that were overturned in court have proven to be issues with these national rental reporting companies. They may accept any allegation of eviction without checking their facts or removing fraudulent information from their listings.
As a renter you need to know what your future landlord may do to investigate your history. The Records Background Blog has published an interesting article advising landlords on how to check renter history. Of course, you owe it to yourself to work out any issues with past and current landlords before they land in your history file. Being a responsible renter is the first step toward establishing a clean rental history.
Invalid and inaccurate information is kept on file for many years by these irresponsible reporting companies. Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax may not be the only companies destroying your reputation with mangled addresses and other inappropriate information. The rental history reporting industry seldom comes under scrutiny but its erroneous information may force you to pay higher deposits, cause some landlords to deny your application, or otherwise impact on your life in a negative way.
Landlords should act more responsible and treat all information they receive from credit bureaus and rental history reporting agencies with a grain of salt. Leasing office managers owe it to themselves to personally vet applicants. In many cases the information provided by third-party agencies is reliable, but given the high rate of failure, consumers and landlords need to reach out to each other and work together to build better relationships.