RentBureau, an online real-time independent repository of apartment rental payment histories, has partnered with ChoicePoint to provide rental payment information to property owners as part of ChoicePoint's resident screening and collection service, Resident Data.
Rent payment data collected by RentBureau from multi-family owners and managers across the U.S. will be linked to Resident Data's database network. Through RentBureau's National Rental Data Exchange (NRDE), Resident Data clients can filter residential applications with their own customized leasing criteria to identify potentially good and bad renters, thus enabling them to make better leasing decisions.
The partnership will also provided Resident Data access to millions of rental payment records available to RentBureau's member property owners and managers, including Equity Residential, Post Properties, BRE, Julian LeCraw & Co., as well as other data partners.
This alliance will definitely make the Resident Data service a more robust one. Customers rely on ChoicePoint to help them manage their risks, so the more complete information they have, the better. It really isn't possible to give customers too much data, as long as that data is relevant to their needs. In this case, combining the resources of RentBureau and ChoicePoint to yield a more complete service just makes sense.
It also seems that it was easier for ChoicePoint to form this partnership than try to acquire such data on its own. It appears that the integration will be fairly smooth, and customers will be able to benefit from this collaboration immediately.