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Tenant Screening Reports

Why Landlords Choose Private Eye Reports

Most tenant-screening services are built around a landlord account: you sign up, you keep a subscription live, and you log in each time you need a report. That model suits a company screening dozens of applicants a month. It suits a landlord with one unit and one vacancy far less well. This service is built the other way round.

• The applicant can order and pay. You can place the order yourself, or send the applicant a request and let them order and pay for their own report during the application process. You still receive the results. For credit, the applicant’s signed permission travels with the rental application.
• No subscription, no monthly fee, no account to maintain. You order when you have a vacancy and pay for that report. Nothing renews in the background between tenancies.
• No login required. Results are delivered to you directly rather than parked behind a portal you have to remember the password for.
• Same-day delivery. Most reports are generated and delivered the same day, often within hours.
• Every report comes with a human to talk to. Reading a screening report is where most landlords get stuck — a stale address, an old filing, a name that nearly matches. Consulting on your report is included at no charge.
• In business since 2004. Two decades of running these searches, across all fifty states and the District of Columbia.

What Separates a Report You Can Act On

Two screening reports on the same applicant can reach opposite conclusions, and the difference is rarely the amount of data. It is usually one of three things.

Whether the records actually belong to your applicant

Common names are the single biggest source of wrong decisions. A criminal record or an eviction filed against a different person with the same name — or the same name and a close date of birth — is the error that does real damage in both directions: it can sink an applicant who did nothing, or clear one who did. Address history is what ties records to a person, which is why a complete address history matters more than the length of the record list.

Whether an old record still means anything

A judgment that was satisfied, an eviction that was dismissed, a filing from a decade ago under different circumstances — these appear in a report as entries, not as conclusions. What matters is the disposition and the date, and whether the pattern repeats. A single filing eight years ago and three filings in two years are not the same signal, even though a feature grid counts them identically.

Whether you can lawfully use it

Screening is regulated. The Fair Credit Reporting Act governs how a consumer report may be obtained and what you must do if you decline an applicant because of it, and state and local law increasingly limits what may be considered at all — criminal-record look-back periods, source-of-income protections, and rules on what may be asked. A report that surfaces something you may not lawfully act on has not helped you. Tenant screening laws by state sets out the rules jurisdiction by jurisdiction, and adverse action covers what to send when you decline.