Smartmove Eviction Report, Creates more Questions than Answers

[Jacob Morgan]

While performing the final step of my screening process, I use the Smartmove service to access the credit, criminal, and eviction reports. I usually find this service very useful for the credit reports, but I'm never sure how much to rely on the completeness or relevancy of the data provided for the criminal or eviction portions. 

A new issue showed up with a tenant screen that I just performed. I had an eviction record that came back for a tenant living in New York City. The record shows that a suit was filed for a certain amount around a year ago. Since this was a large red flag, and since the applicant had not mentioned an eviction on the application, I asked the applicant to explain it. The response was that there was a problem with lost/stolen money orders not being received by the landlord and some arrangement worked out with the landlord to wait for the money order company to replace and refund them. It appears that the landlord filed a suit in the county housing court over the issue five months later, but the tenant claims to have not been notified of this filing. 

To get the other side of this story, and for the usual landlord questioning screen I've tried contacting the landlord - a large corporate property management company (common in NYC) - which turns out to have a non-working telephone number (which is clearly shown on their website), and they are a total dead end for trying to get information.

Now I would have moved on after my first attempt to call this previous landlord and found the non-working number and impossibility to confirm tenancy info with them had it not been for the fact that this applicant appears stellar in all other ways - high income, high credit score/clean report, good current landlord review, etc., and is far above all my other applicants for this property at this time. The applicant passes the gut feeling check, but there's this record to deal with.

I searched the state civil courts website by name and case number (listed in the Smartmove report) to find the same record, but am unable to locate it. I'm starting to think that the record that Smartmove picked up is a preliminary case filing record. The status showing is "New Suit." There is no indication that there was a judgment entered. 

A fair bit has been written about "tenant blacklists" that have essentially been created by preemptive filings for eviction by landlords in NYC and other cities which have severely hampered tenants' prospects for finding housing over relatively minor issues occurring during their tenancies. Could this be one of those situations?

And as a final head scratcher, this record did not factor into Smartmove's accept or decline recommendations. Is Smartmove telling me that it knows this record may not be relevant since it is recommending accepting the applicant even though it turned up an eviction record?