Does apartments.com report rent payments to credit bureaus?

[Alex Tang]

I recall reporting rent payments to credit bureaus was a feature on Cozy, but I'm not sure if apartments.com does it.  Does anyone know?

[Steven S.]

Yes they do it automatically, you have no option to prevent this type of reporting. The IRS will get Apts.com version of your rental income, and if your reported doesn't match, big red flag.

If you are referring to your tenant's credit scores, no they will not affect those unless you file for collection.

[Kyle Meyer]

Hey, I work at Apartments and formerly Cozy on the software engineering team and just want to clarify: we do not report tenant's rent payments to credit bureaus any longer. Steven, you're right though that we have to report to the IRS how much money a landlord receives through the platform when it crosses the reporting threshold.

Credit bureaus promised that tenants reporting rent payment history would help tenants build credit. This seems a noble goal. However, in the real world, we saw issues with this. One is that we didn't get any actual evidence from credit bureaus that credit scores were improving. They may have; we don't know if or how much. The other is that any sort of offline payment, pre-payment, or in at least one case I can remember, a legitimate habitability issue that led to a tenant not paying rent one month led to a gap in that tenant's reported rent payment history. The next time a tenant in one of these scenarios goes to rent somewhere, their credit report show a gap in their rent payment history missing the context of why there's a gap, leading to a potentially rejected application even if their credit score is slightly higher.

Based on the data we've seen so far, reporting a tenant's rent payment history to the bureaus does more harm than good because of all the myriad things that can go wrong leading to a confusing permanent record for those tenants.