TenantTracks Blog
CT Judicial Website - Not For Screening tenants
Date: 03/12/2019
7 Facts You Need To Know about Screening Potential Tenants on the CT Judicial Website
Why screening tenants on the CT Judicial website is unreliable.
- Missing Records - The CT Judicial website only searches 3 years of eviction records when professional screening services provide 7 years of records which amounts to about 100,000 more eviction cases.
- Only 1 out of 50 States -Then you have to consider eviction and criminal records from other States. Tenants do move around often and you will never find any eviction or criminal record from another State on the CT Judicial website.
- Missing Courthouses - Most people don’t know this but Courts located in Bantam, Danielson, Danbury, Derby, Norwich, New London and Middletown never reported their eviction records to any national database until recently. TenantTracks is the only screening company that has these eviction records from all 8 CT Counties; meaning that 5 of the 8 CT Counties have gaping holes in their data for eviction cases.
- Unverified Information - Accuracy is what is most important when screening tenants. People do have common names and you can’t tell one Jim Smith from another Jim Smith on CT Judicial. The Fair Credit Reporting Act requires screening companies to be as accurate as possible and records found on a professional screening report are matched to addresses where the applicant previously lived, there is no validation of records on CT Judicial.
- Alias & Nicknames - Because TenantTracks maintains its own Connecticut eviction database we programmed into our searches ‘Alias and nickname logic.” For instance, many people change their names when they get married and if you type in Robert as a first name not all programs will also look for results that say Bob. If this logic is not part of the query, you will miss many cases. When screening tenants you do not want to live any stone unturned because a bad decision costs around $5,000 today in lost rents and costs.
- Wrong Decisions - The odds are not in your favor if you are relying on the CT Judicial website because you could be potentially denying a qualified applicant because they share a common with someone with negative records or you could be accepting a tenant that is not qualified because four years of eviction records are missing.
- Violating Tenant’s Rights - The last risk is probably the most damning and that’s the potential for a Fair Housing Discrimination claim because you denied someone using an unsubstantiated and unverified record and it was not accurate. It would be fairly easy to make a CHRO acquisition against a landlord or Realtor because everyone belongs to one protected class of another in Connecticut and without having any solid basis for rejecting a rental applicant, you could be at risk.
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