Credit, Criminal and Eviction Reports: What Each One Tells a Landlord

Tenant screening reports come in three main types, and landlords get into trouble when they treat one as a substitute for the others. A credit report, a criminal search and an eviction search each answer a different question about an applicant. Serving landlords and employers since 1982 as a division of Tenant Screening Services, LLC, we have seen plenty of approvals go wrong because the landlord ordered one report, saw nothing alarming, and assumed the other two would have been clean as well. Here is what each report actually tells you, what it leaves out, and how to read the three as a set. This is general information rather than legal advice; a landlord-tenant attorney in your state can confirm how the rules apply to your rentals.

The credit report: how the applicant handles money

For a practical ordering walkthrough, see how landlords run a tenant credit check. You can also compare eviction history searches and complete tenant screening options before choosing reports.

A tenant credit report is the same kind of file a lender sees: open and closed accounts, payment history, balances relative to limits, collections, and recent inquiries, usually summarized with a score. It is the best single indicator of whether rent will be paid on time, because it shows the applicant's track record with other recurring obligations.

What it does not show is just as important. Since July 2017 the three nationwide credit bureaus have excluded civil judgments from credit reports, a change the CFPB documented in its review of the new public-record standards. An eviction judgment therefore almost never appears on a credit report anymore. The report will also tell you nothing about criminal history, and a thin file (a young renter, a newcomer, a cash-first household) is not the same as a bad one.

The criminal search: records, not rumors

A criminal search returns records matched to the applicant's name, date of birth and other identifiers from court and corrections sources. The two things to read carefully are the jurisdiction and the disposition. A nationwide database search is wide but not deep; it covers many sources but may lag behind the county courthouse where a case was actually filed. A county search is the primary source but only for that county. The disposition tells you how the case ended: a dismissal, a deferred adjudication and a conviction are very different outcomes that can share the same charge name.

Federal law sets different clocks for different records. Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, a screening company may not report arrest records that are more than seven years old, while criminal convictions carry no federal time limit, as the FCRA's section 605 spells out. Several states impose shorter limits on conviction reporting, which is one reason the same applicant can look different from one state to another. Whatever the report shows, apply your written criteria the same way to every applicant; the Fair Housing Act's protections, summarized in HUD's overview, apply to how you use criminal history as much as to anything else.

The eviction search: the question the credit report stopped answering

An eviction search goes to civil court records to find landlord-tenant filings connected to the applicant. Because judgments left the credit bureaus' files, this search is now the only reliable way to learn whether an applicant has been taken to court by a previous landlord. Read it in two layers. A filing shows that a landlord started a case; a judgment shows how the court ruled. Many filings end in dismissal or a payment agreement, and some are filed against every adult on a lease regardless of who caused the problem.

The seven-year limit applies here too: the FCRA bars reporting civil suits and civil judgments that are more than seven years old (or older than the governing statute of limitations, whichever is longer). And because eviction records are matched largely by name, they are the category most likely to belong to someone else. The CFPB has reported applicants being denied housing over records that were outdated or belonged to another person, so confirm that the address, date of birth or other identifiers line up before you act on a hit.

Reading the three together

Each report covers a blind spot in the other two. The pattern we suggest to landlords is simple:

• Verify identity first (name, date of birth, Social Security number), so the other reports are run on the right person.
• Use the credit report for payment behavior and debt load, not for eviction or criminal history.
• Use the criminal search for relevant, recent convictions, and read the disposition before the charge name.
• Use the eviction search for landlord-tenant court history, and distinguish a filing from a judgment.
• Compare all three against the same written criteria for every adult applicant, and keep a one-line note of the decision.

When a report leads to a no, or a maybe

If anything in these reports leads you to deny the application, ask for a larger deposit, require a co-signer or charge more rent, that is an adverse action under the FCRA. The FTC's guidance for landlords explains that the applicant must get a notice with the screening company's contact details, a statement that the screening company did not make the decision, and their right to dispute the report and obtain a free copy within 60 days. That notice is also the mechanism that lets an applicant correct a record that was never theirs.

Ordering all three reports costs a few dollars more than ordering one. Discovering after move-in what the missing report would have shown costs considerably more.