Apartments - Credit Report

You’ve finally found the perfect apartment, the perfect roommate. Everything is ready to go except now you have to actually apply for your apartment and hope you get approved. The rental application gives approval from you to pull your credit report up. At this point do you have any idea what’s on your credit report? Have you thought of this yet? Can this affect whether or not you get your perfect apartment? It’s time to find out what your credit report says about you.

According to federal law, you are entitled to see one free credit report each year from one of the three big agencies: Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. However, they don’t send them to you voluntarily. You have to request one from them yourself.

All credit reports are broken up into four sections: identifying information, credit history, public records and inquiries.

Identifying information is just what is says it is. Its data that describes your background, including your name, date of birth, social security number, current and past addresses, employers and phone numbers. You need to carefully look over this information to verify that it’s all correct. Sometimes information may be reported incorrectly and multiple versions of your name and social security number may be listed.

Credit history is where you’ll find the creditors name and account number. Sometimes this information is scrambled and partially hidden for security purposes. Here is where you’ll find information about each account you have and when it was opened, the kind of credit you have (car loan, credit card, etc.), whose name the account is in, amount of the loan, how much is owed, account status (open, inactive, paid, etc.), payments (fixed monthly, minimum amount) and how well you’ve paid the account.

Public records are a part of the report you want to hope to see blank every time. This isn’t your criminal or driving record, but it relates to financial information such as bankruptcies or tax liens.

Inquiries are where it tells when your credit report has been looked up by other companies for financial purposes. A “hard” inquiry is made when you fill out your apartment application. “Soft” inquiries refer to when companies want to send promotional information, like those pre-qualified credit cards you receive in the mail. Soft inquirires won’t affect your credit report. However, hard inquiries can lower your credit score in some cases, but generally won’t. Reporting companies have grace periods in place to account for times when multiple hard inquiries may be needed. So hard inquiries within 30 days of auto or car loans count as one and multiple hard inquiries within a 14-day period count as one too. If you find an error in your report you need to take care of it immediately. You have to fill out a form that was included with your report or online. Errors can take time to correct because creditors have 30 days to respond to a dispute. Be sure to keep track of any errors that you find.