Tenant Screening Reports Under the FCRA: Accuracy, Eviction Records and the Landlord's Notice

Tenant Screening Companies as Consumer Reporting Agencies

The Fair Credit Reporting Act does not mention tenants in its definitions. It reaches rental screening because the definition of a consumer report is written around purpose rather than industry. 15 U.S.C. 1681a(d) covers communications by a consumer reporting agency bearing on a consumer's credit worthiness, character, general reputation, personal characteristics or mode of living that are used or expected to be used as a factor in eligibility for credit, insurance, employment or any other purpose authorized under section 1681b. Housing sits in that last category. In the AppFolio complaint, the government pleaded that rental reports are used to determine eligibility for "a business transaction initiated by consumers," the permissible purpose at section 1681b(a)(3)(F).

Two features of the rental market make the FCRA's definitions matter more than they do elsewhere. First, a rental report typically bundles records of different kinds: credit data from a nationwide bureau, criminal court records and eviction court records, often bought from a data vendor rather than pulled from the courthouse. Second, the company that sells the report to the landlord is frequently not the company that collected the records. Section 1681a(u) has a name for that business: a "reseller," a consumer reporting agency that assembles and merges information from another agency's database to furnish it to a third party and does not maintain a database of the merged information from which new reports are produced.

Being a reseller does not remove a company from the statute. A reseller is defined as a kind of consumer reporting agency, so the accuracy duty below applies to it as well. That point was the center of the AppFolio case, where the complaint alleged the company "generally relied" on its vendor's matching procedures and had "limited knowledge" of how the vendor matched, retrieved and returned records.

Maximum Possible Accuracy Under § 607(b)

Section 607(b) of the FCRA, codified at 15 U.S.C. 1681e(b), is one sentence long: "Whenever a consumer reporting agency prepares a consumer report it shall follow reasonable procedures to assure maximum possible accuracy of the information concerning the individual about whom the report relates." It is a standard about procedures. The statute does not say every report must be correct; it says the agency must follow reasonable procedures aimed at maximum possible accuracy, and the enforcement record turns on what those procedures were.

For tenant reports the duty runs alongside the obsolescence rules in section 1681c(a). Paragraph (2) excludes civil suits, civil judgments and records of arrest that, from date of entry, antedate the report by more than seven years or until the governing statute of limitations has expired, whichever is longer. Paragraph (5) excludes any other adverse item of information more than seven years old, "other than records of convictions of crimes." An eviction case is a civil suit, so the seven-year line applies to it; a criminal conviction is the one adverse item the paragraph leaves out. Section 1681e(a) separately requires every agency to maintain reasonable procedures designed to avoid violations of section 1681c.

The two tenant screening orders discussed below describe, in specific terms, what the agencies allegedly got wrong. The recurring categories were records belonging to someone else, the same case reported more than once, a filing reported without the outcome that followed it, dollar figures labelled as something they were not, and records that a court had sealed.

The CFPB Advisory Opinion on Name-Only Matching

On November 10, 2021 the CFPB published an advisory opinion, Fair Credit Reporting; Name-Only Matching Procedures, 86 FR 62468. It defined name-only matching as matching information to a consumer "based solely on whether the consumer's first and last names are identical or similar" to the names associated with the information, and it took the position that an agency using that practice is not using reasonable procedures under section 607(b). The opinion's background section described landlords and employers as major users of background screening reports and cited the Third Circuit's 2010 decision in Cortez v. Trans Union and the Ninth Circuit's 2020 decision in Ramirez v. TransUnion on name matching against a federal sanctions list.

On January 23, 2024 the Bureau followed with Fair Credit Reporting; Background Screening, 89 FR 4171. That opinion stated that an agency reporting public records is not using reasonable procedures if it lacks procedures to prevent reporting information that is duplicative or that has been expunged, sealed or otherwise legally restricted from public access, and it read section 1681c(a)(5) so that each adverse item carries its own seven-year period, "not restarted or reopened by the occurrence of subsequent events." Its examples included the same eviction reported twice and an eviction action reported without its dismissal.

Neither opinion is current Bureau guidance. On May 12, 2025 the CFPB published Interpretive Rules, Policy Statements, and Advisory Opinions; Withdrawal, 90 FR 20084, which lists both, as items 4 and 11 of its advisory opinions, among the documents withdrawn as of that date. The notice states that the withdrawal "is not necessarily final," that the Bureau intends to keep reviewing the documents, and that it does not intend to prioritize enforcement of the withdrawn guidance while the withdrawal is pending.

What the withdrawal changes is the Bureau's stated interpretation. It does not change section 1681e(b) or section 1681c, and it does not vacate any court order. The cases the 2021 opinion relied on, and the consent orders described below, remain in the record as they were entered.

Adverse Action Notices From Landlords

The landlord is a user of the report, not the agency, and its obligations come from a different section. Section 1681m(a) applies to any person who takes adverse action with respect to a consumer "based in whole or in part on any information contained in a consumer report." That person must provide notice of the adverse action; disclose any numerical credit score used, with the related information listed in section 1681g(f)(1); give the name, address and telephone number of the agency that furnished the report and a statement that the agency did not make the decision and cannot explain it; and give notice of the consumer's right to a free copy of the report within 60 days and to dispute its accuracy with the agency.

There is a difference here from employment screening that is easy to miss. The pre-adverse action step, in which the user hands over a copy of the report and a summary of rights before acting, is in section 1681b(b)(3), and its text is limited to a person "using a consumer report for employment purposes." Nothing in that paragraph extends it to housing. A rental denial engages section 1681m(a) only, unless a state law adds more, as several do.

Section 1681m(c) gives users a defense: no person is liable for a violation of the section if it shows by a preponderance of the evidence that it maintained reasonable procedures to assure compliance at the time. The 2023 TransUnion Rental Screening order also reached the landlord side indirectly. Section IV of that order requires the screening company to make available to its rental customers, and publish on its website, a template adverse action notice consistent with section 1681m that prompts the landlord to attach a copy of the report and state the principal reasons for the decision.

Disputes and Reinvestigation

An applicant who disputes an item takes it up with the agency, not the landlord. Under section 1681i(a)(1)(A), when a consumer disputes the completeness or accuracy of an item and notifies the agency directly or through a reseller, the agency must, free of charge, conduct a reasonable reinvestigation and record the current status of the item or delete it before the end of the 30-day period beginning when it receives the notice. Paragraph (1)(B) permits one extension of up to 15 days where the consumer supplies relevant information during the 30 days.

• Within five business days of receiving the dispute, the agency notifies whoever furnished the disputed item (section 1681i(a)(2)).
• If the item is found inaccurate or incomplete or cannot be verified, the agency deletes or modifies it promptly and tells the furnisher (section 1681i(a)(5)(A)).
• Written results go to the consumer no later than five business days after the reinvestigation is complete, with a revised report (section 1681i(a)(6)).
• If the reinvestigation does not resolve the dispute, the consumer may file a statement, which the agency may limit to 100 words, and later reports must note the dispute (section 1681i(b) and (c)).

The dispute route depends on knowing where a record came from, which is why section 1681g(a)(2) requires an agency, on request, to disclose "the sources of the information" in the consumer's file. A file disclosure naming the county court as the source, when the record actually came from a data vendor, sends the consumer to the wrong place. That was the second count in the TransUnion Rental Screening case.

Federal Enforcement Against Screening Companies

Two federal tenant screening cases were read for this post from their filed complaints and orders. Both settled, so the allegations in the complaints were not adjudicated.

TransUnion Rental Screening Solutions (2023). On October 12, 2023 the CFPB and the FTC filed a joint complaint in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado, No. 1:23-cv-02659, against TransUnion Rental Screening Solutions and its parent Trans Union LLC. The complaint alleged that the company furnished hundreds of thousands of reports with eviction records each year and failed to follow reasonable procedures to prevent multiple entries for one eviction case, to report the final disposition, to label data fields accurately (a "Judgment Amount" field allegedly held whatever the landlord claimed was owed) and to keep sealed eviction records out. It alleged that the company's contract with its eviction data vendor accepted the vendor's information "AS IS," and that until June 2021 file disclosures named the court jurisdiction as the sole source of records that came from a vendor. The stipulated order, entered October 18, 2023 according to the CFPB's enforcement page, requires written procedures to keep out sealed records, eviction records without a final outcome, multiple filings for one proceeding, superseded filings and any amount other than a final judgment or a satisfaction of one. It also requires a dispute-monitoring program with root cause analysis, a compliance committee meeting at least quarterly, free file disclosures, $11 million in consumer redress and a $4 million civil money penalty.

AppFolio (2020). On December 8, 2020 the United States, acting on referral from the FTC, filed suit against AppFolio in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, No. 1:20-cv-03563 (FTC case page). The complaint pleaded two counts: reporting eviction records and non-conviction criminal records more than seven years old until at least June 2019, in violation of section 1681c(a), and failing until at least April 2019 to follow reasonable procedures under section 1681e(b). It alleged reports containing records for people with a different name or date of birth from the applicant, records for several different people at once, missing or wrong dispositions and duplicate entries. The stipulated order filed the same day enjoins reporting items beyond the section 1681c(a) periods and failing to maintain reasonable accuracy procedures, and enters a $4,250,000 civil penalty.

The CFPB's 2021 opinion also cited, as part of the same pattern, an FTC complaint against RealPage alleging that its tenant reports matched criminal records on "an exact match on the applicant's last name only" with soft matches on the rest. That case is described here only as the Bureau characterized it; its complaint and order were not retrieved for this post.

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