Landlords Recoil from Property Data Websites

"I've lived in buildings where I never even knew who owned the place," Ronda Kaysen writes in the New York Times. "I only knew the management company, and even that was a little vague."

That experience may be familiar to renters. But while tenants are subject to scrutiny, they're required to trust landlords on faith, Kaysen points out.

In New York, a young company called Rentlogic is attempting to level the playing field by providing tenants with more information during the apartment hunt stage. The searchable site analyzes the history of individual properties, as well as the portfolios of landlords and property managers, to produce a letter grade for every listing.

But backlash from landlords has already prompted New York’s largest real-estate firm to withdraw all its listings after just eight days.

Landlords balked partly because Rentlogic tracks data for seven years — as long as a renter’s credit history — and a building might have been owned or managed by a different company when problems occurred.

To that, Kaysen retorts: "Renters have long been judged by data that does not tell the full story."

A tenant whose ex-husband ruined her credit with a voracious spending habit still has to live with that poor credit score for seven years. Or, if a tenant went to housing court, her name could permanently end up on a tenant-screening database known as the tenant blacklist, even if she prevailed in court.

New York has recently seen efforts to limit or regulate the tenant blacklists, although it is still in use.