Major Tenant Screening Company’s Bad Data Is Hurting Low-Income Renters, Lawsuit Alleges

A fashionable tenant screening institution utilized by low-income lodging landlords has been providing inaccurate and biased inheritance checks, perchance blocking qualified renters from being approved for apartments, according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday.

Since 2018 the screening work RentGrow has had a declaration with the District of Columbia Housing Authority to supply inheritance checks connected lodging voucher recipients. It besides works with backstage and market-rate landlords astir the state to surface tenants.

Those screenings are based connected mediocre prime information often riddled with errors, according to the suit filed successful a D.C. superior tribunal by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and the National Association of Consumer Advocates (NACA). They allege that RentGrow knows the information it uses tin beryllium unreliable and that the company’s wholly automated inheritance cheque process doesn’t see capable information checking to place and forestall mistakes.

“Imagine being denied entree to the location you merit due to the fact that a institution you’ve ne'er heard of churned retired a specious inheritance study based connected defective information fed done a dubious algorithm,” John Davisson, EPIC’s manager of litigation, said successful a statement. “This nightmare is simply a world for excessively galore District residents, who are forced to flooded RentGrow’s faulty screening strategy to entree indispensable lodging opportunities—a load that falls heaviest connected already-marginalized communities. It’s past clip for RentGrow to cleanable up its act.”

RentGrow and its competitors successful the automatic tenant screening manufacture person repeatedly been accused by user lawsuits and national regulators successful caller years of violating the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which requires companies to travel tenable procedures to guarantee that accusation included successful inheritance reports is accurate.

The EPIC and NACA suit alleges that RentGrow’s superior root of information astir imaginable tenants is simply a work called TransUnion Background Data Solutions and that RentGrow does not validate the sources oregon accuracy of that data. That’s “particularly troubling,” according to the lawsuit, due to the fact that federal regulators fined TransUnion $15 cardinal past twelvemonth for failing to guarantee the accuracy of the tenant screening information it provided.

As a effect of the deficiency of prime control, RentGrow’s inheritance reports for a tenant whitethorn incorrectly see apprehension and eviction records for a antithetic idiosyncratic who has the aforesaid sanction oregon whitethorn see records that are much than 7 years old, which is prohibited by the Fair Credit Reporting Act, according to the lawsuit.

Even erstwhile the information is accurate, EPIC and NACA allege, overmuch of the accusation RentGrow’s hazard scoring algorithms gully on, similar transgression and eviction history, bespeak systemic radical biases that disadvantage Black and Hispanic renters.

RentGrow, which is simply a subsidiary of the lodging bundle institution Yardi, did not instantly respond to a petition for comment.