Why should I pull an Eviction Report in addition to a Credit Report?
The current economic climate and national housing crisis are not limited to homeowners facing foreclosure. Tenant eviction rates have also been on the rise for the past few years. The National Sheriff’s Association has reported an increase in the number of forceful evictions by law enforcement officers over the last few years.
An eviction is arguably the most important information a landlord can have for screening an individual for an apartment rental. If a prospective tenant has been evicted, it is certainly an indication that the individual may present risks that should be evaluated before the landlord rents to the applicant.
Despite the value of eviction information in managing the risk of rental property, we have found that far too often landlords rely solely on the evictions data that appears on the applicant’s credit report and miss very relevant evictions data that can only be found on an Evictions report.
Eviction judgments that result in money judgments are found in the public record section of an individual credit report. However, estimates are that 75% of eviction filings never result in a money judgment – that is a lot of potential problem tenants that are flying under the radar. For those evictions that do result in a money judgment, it typically takes up to 90 days to show up on a credit report – 90 days is a long time to search for a new apartment.
Landlords that only use a credit report for their tenant screening are simply missing far too many individuals that represent a default risk to their business. For this reason, we always recommend an Evictions report for tenant screening and include Evictions as a standard part of our Rental Report card with the SmartDep program. We also recommend our Eviction report for loan originations, since eviction data can be a strong indicator of an applicant’s ability to repay a loan.
An Evictions report is generated from a multi-state database search of individuals where all legal proceedings to evict an individual originated by their landlords are reported. The information contained in the Eviction report comes from public records and offers information on original filing of eviction, possession and money judgments. The tenant eviction report search is based on name, address and social security number. Eviction reports represent a valuable source of information about a prospective tenant. Typical eviction reports contain information about the defendant in the action, including his/ her name, date of birth and residence, and also non-monetary judgments that will not show up in a tenant credit report.
Our newest evictions product, Enhanced Evictions, searches an individual’s complete address history against the eviction database to return all evictions records for those addresses during the times an individual was living at those addresses. This new product will uncover evictions that no other report on the market will discover. This is a tool that should definitely be in every landlord’s toolkit.