Tenant screening- credit scores and SSNs

[Nilusha Jayasinghe]

Hi all,

I'm a new small-time landlord figuring out my process for screening tenants for an apartment in Chicago. It seems like most all popular screening services like Mysmartmove, Rentspree, etc use the Transunion "resident score" instead of producing actual FICO credit scores for tenants. I wanted to ideally use a minimum credit score cut off for tenants since that's something I'm familiar with and know how to interpret, so I'm wondering if you all do the same and if so, what screening service do you use that gives you tenants' actual credit score? For those that don't go by the credit score, can you tell me how your experience has been with using the "resident score" for screening?

Also curious to know if you all collect tenants' SSN, maybe  in case of future evictions, dealing with sending tenants to collections, etc? If so, do you use anything to double check that the SSN they're providing is actually theirs? Finally, do you know if there are any legal requirements for how landlords need to store tenants' SSNs?

Thank you in advance for all of your expertise and help as I try to learn!

[John Warren]

@Nilusha Jayasinghe I always collect a potential residents social security number, DOB and license. If you ever do have to evict and try to collect, this is your only shot. A lot of online "applications" through popular sites like Zillow or others will either redact this or will delete the application.... not idea. This is where a simple, old school paper application/word document will serve you well. 

I have used Transunion smart move before we switched to professional software a few years ago. It is pretty robust and the resident score is indicative of the credit score. I believe it might actually correspond with a credit score. I never had issues with any tenants we placed when we used it, and we placed probably 40-50 on that platform before switching out.