Class Action Claims RentGrow’s Tenant Screening Reports Include Inaccurate, Out-of-Date Eviction Information

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A proposed class action lawsuit alleges RentGrow routinely sells screening reports to landlords that contain inaccurate and outdated eviction information about prospective tenants.

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The 15-page lawsuit says that rather than obtain data about consumers’ past eviction cases from official, regularly updated sources like publicly available court records, credit reporting agency RentGrow gets its information for tenant screening reports from a third-party vendor. The result, the case argues, is that RentGrow ends up publishing “stale” public record information about eviction cases that have been dismissed, withdrawn, vacated, satisfied or resulted in judgments in favor of prospective tenants.

The complaint accuses RentGrow of violating the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), which requires companies to ensure the maximum possible accuracy of the information it provides to landlords and property managers. According to the filing, the defendant has no procedures in place to ensure compliance with the FCRA and merely passes along whatever information it receives from its vendor without checking for accuracy.

“[The] defendant should know better,” the lawsuit claims, noting that the First Circuit Court of Appeals informed RentGrow in 2022 that its failure to maintain a process for verifying the completeness or correctness of the court-records information it received from its vendor could lead a jury to conclude that it has broken federal law.

Per the complaint, the court also highlighted that from October 2016 to October 2018, RentGrow received 2,953 disputes over the accuracy of screening reports containing eviction-litigation records, 2,526 of which resulted in corrections of some sort, the filing relays.

RentGrow has made no meaningful changes to its policies since being put on notice of its alleged misconduct in 2022, the case charges.

“[RentGrow’s] practices not only violate the FCRA as a matter of law, they exact serious consequences on rental housing applicants,” the suit stresses.

The plaintiff, a Virginia resident, alleges that his rental application was denied in March 2024 after the apartment complex received a report from RentGrow that included an eviction complaint that had been vacated and dismissed without prejudice in March 2020.

“The [tenant screening report] contained no reference to the March 12, 2020 vacatur and dismissal,” the suit says.

Per the filing, the plaintiff had already contested the out-of-date information earlier that month and was forced to go through another lengthy, delayed dispute process with RentGrow that made him unable to secure a lease for several weeks.

The lawsuit looks to represent anyone in the United States and its territories who, within the past two years, was the subject of a tenant screening report prepared by RentGrow that contained public record information about an eviction action but failed to state that the action had been withdrawn, dismissed, non-suited, or resulted in a judgment in favor of the subject of the report according to publicly available court records.

The suit also seeks to represent anyone in the United States and its territories who, within the past two years, disputed the completeness and/or accuracy of public record information in a tenant screening report previously prepared by RentGrow, RentGrow had received a notification from its vendor Contemporary Information Corp. that the disputed information did not exist in the public record, was incomplete, out-of-date, or otherwise inaccurate, and was the subject of another tenant screening report prepared by the defendant that contained the disputed information after receiving its vendor’s notification.

The case lastly looks to cover anyone in the United States and its territories who, within the past two years, disputed the completeness and/or accuracy of public record information in a tenant screening report previously prepared by RentGrow, RentGrow had received a notification from its vendor that the disputed information did not exist in the public record, was incomplete, out-of-date, or otherwise inaccurate, and the defendant failed to correct or delete the incomplete, out-of-date, or otherwise inaccurate data from their files.

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