NACA v. RentGrow

Challenging the unfair and deceptive practices of tenant screening company RentGrow’s automated tenant screening reports

Summary

On October 1, 2024, EPIC, Richman Law & Policy, and the National Association of Consumer Advocates (NACA) filed a consumer protection lawsuit against tenant screening company, RentGrow, for unfair and deceptive practices tied to their automated tenant screening reports. The lawsuit, brought under the D.C. Consumer Protection Procedures Act, alleges that RentGrow automatically generates tenant screening reports that contain serious errors and biases. These errors and biases can cause consumers across the District—most often those from marginalized populations—to lose out on housing opportunities through no fault of their own. Worse still, the complaint alleges that RentGrow neither vets the third-party information it uses to generate tenant screening reports nor monitors its services for errors and biases that could harm consumers. The complaint also alleges that RentGrow deceives consumers and landlords about the reliability of its tenant screening reports and its own compliance with related laws like the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

Factual Background

Tenant background checks and screening reports have become commonplace. To obtain housing, prospective tenants must increasingly rely on third-party screening companies to provide positive recommendations to landlords concerning tenant eligibility. These tenant screening reports require the collection of vast amounts of consumer data from both credit bureaus and data brokers—and in recent years, many of these screening services have turned to AI and automated decision-making systems to generate these reports.

RentGrow, Inc., is one such tenant screening company, which provides automated tenant screening services to landlords, property managers, and other housing providers throughout the District of Columbia and across the country. RentGrow is one of the largest providers of tenant screening services in the country, and since 2018, Rentgrow has also contracted with the D.C. Housing Authority to provides its Service for D.C. public housing and the D.C. Housing Choice Voucher Program (HCVP). The HCVP helps low- and moderate-income residents find affordable housing in privately owned properties across the District. Therefore, prospective tenants’ eligibility for housing under the HCVP can depend on data and recommendations that RentGrow provides.

RentGrow’s Tenant Screening Services

RentGrow automatically generate tenant screening reports based on public records, consumer credit data taken from the three major credit bureaus, and other commercially available data collected from data brokers like LexisNexis. However, longstanding research into these data sources show persistant inaccuracies and within the data that RentGrow uses: duplicate consumer entries, omissions, conflations between different consumers with similar names, and more all impact the accuracy and quality of RentGrow’s automated tenant screening reports. When automated systems like RentGrow’s input inaccurate data, they tend to produce inaccurate results.

Automated decision-making systems like those used by RentGrow also perpetuate racial biases. Sources of the data that these systems rely on—family criminal records, employment data, poor rental payment histories, eviction records, and even address histories—can reflect historical data biases caused by practices like discriminatory redlining and policing practices. When these biases are baked into automated systems, the systems can perpetuate racial biases while presenting the information as objective and backed by science.

RentGrow uses an automated system to collect, process, and repurpose consumer information into its screening reports and recommendations. However, it disclaims needing check the quality or accuracy of the data it collects, meaning that any inaccuracies or biases in third-party data will be perpetuated in RentGrow’s tenant screening reports. Further, RentGrow does not implement standard AI risk management practices to mitigate the risks of errors and biases in its automated services, yet it continues to market its services as an effective means to evaluate rental applicants under the Fair Credit Reporting Act and “all other applicable laws and regulations.”

D.C. Consumers are Harmed by RentGrow’s Services

Because of the inaccuracies and biases baked into RentGrow’s tenant screening reports and recommendations, prospective tenants across the District of Columbia are unfairly impacted when seeking housing. False or incomplete tenant screening reports directly impact whether someone can receive housing and on what terms.

Crucially, there are no easy ways to correct inaccuracies before rental denials occur. RentGrow claims to offer consumers ways to review reports and correct inaccurate information, but many are unaware of the process to submit a RentGrow complaint—or even that errors in RentGrow’s reports are related at all to their housing rejection. Even when consumers dispute RentGrow’s report, the process can take up to 30 days, and people are put in stressful situations where they may lose housing opportunities while waiting for RentGrow to make corrections. And without proper data quality controls in place, RentGrow may recollect and use inaccurate data from third-party sources even after a consumer dispute. Prospective renters, especially HCVP participants, are losing out on housing they qualify for through no fault of their own. They deserve better.

NACA’s Complaint

EPIC, Richman Law & Policy, and NACA filed suit against RentGrow under the D.C. Consumer Protection Procedures Act (DCCPPA) for committing unfair or deceptive trade practices affecting the general public in the District, including consumers subject to RentGrow’s services. Sections 28-3905(k)(1)(C)–(D) of the DCCPPA allows a nonprofit organization like NACA to bring suit “on behalf of the general public.” NACA alleges that RentGrow violated the DCCPPA by providing misleading and inaccurate information about its services and by operating a substantive unfair automated system without taking the necessary steps to prevent consumer harm. As part of its unfairness argument, NACA also alleges that the the discriminatory inputs and outcomes of RentGrow’s tenant screening reports constitute a violation of the DCCPPA.

NACA is asking the court to enjoin RentGrow’s ongoing operation of its faulty tenant screening service unless and until RentGrow can correct and mitigate the inaccuracies and biases present within its tenant screening reports.

EPIC’s Interest

EPIC is a longstanding advocate for legal, ethical, and human rights safeguards for the use of artificial intelligence and automated decision-making tools. EPIC has long urged regulators and the D.C. attorney general to respond to the emergence of commercial AI practices that are unfair or deceptive. For example, EPIC has called on the D.C. attorney general to take enforcement action against five online test proctoring firms because these firms engage in excessive collection of students’ biometric and other personal data and routinely relied on potentially biased AI analysis to detect alleged signs of cheating. EPIC has also called on the Federal Trade Commission to conduct a rulemaking on the use of AI and filed a complaint highlighting Airbnb’s secret customer screening algorithm.

This lawsuit builds on four years of EPIC research and advocacy in automated screening and scoring technologies. Many of these technologies are built atop the data broker ecosystem. EPIC spent 14 months investigating the D.C. government’s use of automated decision-making systems and released Screened & Scored in D.C. to shed light on the prevalence of these systems. EPIC also built off of that work to publish Outsourced & Automated, a report on how state and local governments are outsourcing important government decisions to private AI companies.

EPIC’s public records requests (under respective state Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA statutes), and the records the state government agencies produced, are posted below, after the Legal Documents section.

NACA’s Claims Against RentGrow Survive Motion to Dismiss

On November 21, 2025, the case brought against the tenant screening company, RentGrow, for allegedly providing reports that contain serious errors and biases, survived RentGrow’s motion to dismiss in D.C. Superior Court. This means that NACA’s claims against RentGrow brought under DCCPPA can move forward to discovery and eventually trial.

This is an important victory under consumer protection law that is not federal law, opening the door for many D.C. consumers and consumer advocates to bring lawsuits challenging unfair and deceptive practices. Specifically, the court found in favor of plaintiff NACA on three important issues. First, the court found that NACA has standing to sue under the DCCPPA as a public interest organization, allowing NACA to bring the suit on behalf of consumers without needing to name a specific plaintiff harmed by the challenged practices. Second, the court found that RentGrow is covered as a “merchant” under the DCCPPA, even if RentGrow does not directly sell its services to consumers. RentGrow’s provision of rental screening services to D.C. landlords, which helps determine outcomes for rental applications, is still subject to DC’s UDAP law. Lastly, the court found that Fair Credit and Reporting Act (FCRA), the federal law enacted to promote accuracy and fairness in credit reports, does not preempt the DCCPPA claims regarding harms caused by RentGrow’s tenant screening reports. This order is a major step forward towards stronger legal protections for D.C. consumers.

The D.C. Superior Court granted the motion to dismiss Yardi, the parent company of RentGrow, as a defendant on jurisdictional grounds.

Legal Documents

DC FOIA Documents

IL FOIA Documents

News

• Aaron Wiener, D.C. Contractor Sued for Alleged Improper Screening of Hopeful Tenants, Washington Post (Oct. 3, 2024)
• Todd Feathers, Landlords Froze Out Good Renters Due to Bad Data From Screening Company, Lawsuit Alleges, Gizmodo (Oct. 3, 2024)