The RentGrow lawsuit drawing the most attention is National Association of Consumer Advocates v. RentGrow, a D.C. consumer protection case alleging that the tenant screening company’s automated reports are riddled with errors and biases that cost renters their housing. Filed in October 2024, the case survived RentGrow’s motion to dismiss in November 2025 and is now moving toward discovery. It sits alongside several federal Fair Credit Reporting Act cases challenging how RentGrow reports eviction records and flags applicants against a government terrorism and drug-trafficking watchlist.
What RentGrow Does and Why It’s Being Sued
RentGrow is a wholly owned subsidiary of Yardi Systems that sells tenant screening reports to landlords. It does not gather its own data. It buys records from third-party vendors including TransUnion, Experian, Equifax, and LexisNexis, then runs the information through automated decision-making tools to produce a recommendation the landlord uses to accept or reject an applicant. The company has acknowledged that it relies on those vendors for accuracy and rarely performs manual review.1EPIC. NACA v. RentGrow Complaint
The lawsuits share a common thread: plaintiffs say the reports contain wrong information, applicants get denied because of it, and the systems that produce and correct the reports don’t catch or fix the problem in time.
NACA v. RentGrow: The D.C. Consumer Protection Case
On October 1, 2024, the National Association of Consumer Advocates sued RentGrow and Yardi Systems in D.C. Superior Court under the D.C. Consumer Protection Procedures Act, which prohibits unfair and deceptive trade practices. NACA is represented by the Electronic Privacy Information Center and Richman Law & Policy. The case is docketed as 2024-CAB-006253. It is not a class action; NACA brought it as a public interest organization on behalf of D.C. consumers generally.2EPIC. NACA v. RentGrow
What the Complaint Alleges
The complaint says RentGrow’s reports mix records of people with similar names, include duplicate entries, and retain outdated information such as criminal convictions older than seven years and dismissed eviction filings. NACA also argues that reliance on historical criminal, eviction, and credit data perpetuates racial biases rooted in discriminatory policing and redlining, and that the risk of false identity matches is higher for Hispanic, Asian, and Black applicants because of lower last-name diversity in those populations.1EPIC. NACA v. RentGrow Complaint
Because landlords receive a simple pass-or-fail recommendation, NACA alleges, they reject applicants without ever reviewing the underlying data. Ira Rheingold, NACA’s executive director, said landlords end up “making determinations about tenants based on inaccurate information.”3Washington Post. D.C. Contractor Sued for Alleged Improper Screening of Hopeful Tenants
The complaint singles out participants in the Housing Choice Voucher Program, the federal rental subsidy commonly called Section 8. RentGrow has held a contract with the D.C. Housing Authority since 2018 to screen voucher applicants.3Washington Post. D.C. Contractor Sued for Alleged Improper Screening of Hopeful Tenants NACA alleges the screening system uses factors like debt and account balances to reject voucher holders even when the District is subsidizing their rent.1EPIC. NACA v. RentGrow Complaint
The Dispute Process
RentGrow lets consumers challenge errors by submitting a dispute form with government-issued identification and supporting documents by email, fax, or mail.4RentGrow. Dispute Now Resolution can take up to 30 days, and NACA alleges applicants routinely lose housing opportunities in that window. Even when a dispute succeeds, the complaint argues, the correction does not fix the underlying problem in the third-party data, so the same error can resurface in future reports.1EPIC. NACA v. RentGrow Complaint
The November 2025 Ruling
RentGrow removed the case to federal court, but the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia sent it back on May 16, 2025. Both companies then filed motions to dismiss. RentGrow argued it could not be sued under the D.C. consumer protection law because it does business with landlords, not tenants. Yardi argued the D.C. courts lacked jurisdiction over it as a separate corporate entity.5MLex. Yardi, RentGrow Move to Dismiss Lawsuit Alleging Deceptive Use of Algorithms
On November 21, 2025, Judge Leslie A. Meek denied RentGrow’s motion and granted Yardi’s. The ruling made three findings that matter for the case going forward. NACA has standing to sue as a public interest organization on behalf of the general public, without identifying a specific harmed individual. RentGrow qualifies as a “merchant” under D.C. law even though it sells to landlords rather than tenants, because its work is part of the economic output involved in real estate transactions. And the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act does not preempt the D.C. Consumer Protection Procedures Act in this context.6EPIC. NACA v. RentGrow Motion to Dismiss Denial Order
RentGrow filed its formal answer on December 19, 2025, and demanded a jury trial.7National Association of Consumer Advocates. NACA v. RentGrow Answer The case is proceeding toward discovery. No trial date has been set, and there is no public indication of settlement talks.8EPIC. Judge Says DC Consumer Protection Law May Hold Tenant Screening Company Liable for Inaccurate and Biased Report Data
Green v. RentGrow: The Eviction Records Class Action
On June 25, 2024, Eric L. Green sued RentGrow in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, alleging the company routinely sold tenant screening reports containing inaccurate or outdated eviction information obtained from vendors without verifying it against actual court records.9ClassAction.org. Class Action Claims RentGrow’s Tenant Screening Reports Include Inaccurate, Out-of-Date Eviction Information
The complaint brought claims under two provisions of the Fair Credit Reporting Act: the duty to follow reasonable procedures ensuring maximum possible accuracy, and the duty to conduct a reasonable reinvestigation when a consumer disputes information. It sought class certification for consumers whose reports included stale eviction data — cases that had been dismissed, withdrawn, or resolved in the tenant’s favor — and identified a subclass of people who successfully disputed inaccurate records with RentGrow’s vendor only to see the same errors reappear in later reports.10ClassAction.org. Green v. RentGrow Inc. Complaint
The complaint cited internal RentGrow data showing that between October 2016 and October 2018 the company received 2,953 disputes about eviction records and made corrections in 2,526 of them.9ClassAction.org. Class Action Claims RentGrow’s Tenant Screening Reports Include Inaccurate, Out-of-Date Eviction Information Court records show the case terminated on June 30, 2025. The docket does not indicate whether it was settled, dismissed, or resolved by other means.11CourtListener. Green v. Rentgrow, Inc.
Fernandez v. RentGrow: OFAC Watchlist False Positives
A separate line of litigation targets RentGrow’s practice of screening applicants against the Office of Foreign Assets Control list, a federal database of people linked to terrorism and drug trafficking. In Fernandez v. RentGrow, Inc., filed in the District of Maryland, Marco Fernandez alleged that a RentGrow report flagged him as a “possible match” to a suspected drug trafficker named Mario Alberto Fernandez Santana based only on a loose name match, without checking date of birth, address, or Social Security number.12U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Fernandez v. RentGrow, Inc.
The district court denied RentGrow’s motion for summary judgment and certified a class of individuals whose reports contained false OFAC matches between April 2017 and May 2019. On September 11, 2024, the Fourth Circuit vacated that class certification. The appellate court held that Fernandez had not shown a concrete injury because the property manager who received the report testified she did not know what OFAC was, did not read the OFAC section, and did not rely on it. Sending an inaccurate report to a third party, the court held, is not enough on its own; someone has to actually read and understand the false information for it to cause a reputational injury sufficient to sue.12U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Fernandez v. RentGrow, Inc. The case was sent back to reconsider class certification under that standard.
McIntyre v. RentGrow: The Earlier First Circuit Ruling
An earlier case set a precedent that still shapes RentGrow litigation. Patricia McIntyre alleged that a 2017 screening report contained materially inaccurate information about her housing and eviction history, including a failure to note that a complaint had been withdrawn and a civil judgment paid. She sued in the District of Massachusetts, claiming negligent and willful FCRA violations.13FindLaw. McIntyre v. RentGrow, Inc.
In May 2022, the First Circuit affirmed summary judgment for RentGrow. The court acknowledged a jury could reasonably find the report inaccurate and RentGrow’s verification procedures lacking, but concluded the conduct did not rise to the recklessness required for a willful FCRA violation. McIntyre had pointed to a 2015 Consumer Financial Protection Bureau publication flagging weaknesses in how screening companies handle third-party public records. The First Circuit called that guidance “spare and cryptic” and insufficient to put RentGrow on clear notice that its practices were unreasonable. The court also noted that RentGrow had taken some quality-control steps, describing its data vendor as “gold standard” and filtering out roughly a quarter of incoming records.13FindLaw. McIntyre v. RentGrow, Inc.
The ruling was a win for RentGrow. But the Green plaintiffs later cited it against the company, arguing that the First Circuit’s recognition that its accuracy procedures could be found unreasonable should have prompted a change in practice.9ClassAction.org. Class Action Claims RentGrow’s Tenant Screening Reports Include Inaccurate, Out-of-Date Eviction Information
The Regulatory Backdrop
A November 2022 CFPB report examined 17 major tenant screening companies and found market incentives favor “comprehensiveness of derogatory information at the expense of accurate information.” Automated retrieval of court records costs about one-seventh what manual verification costs, and only five of the 17 companies advertised any manual review. A study of 3.6 million eviction court records cited in the report found 22 percent were ambiguous or false.14Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Tenant Background Checks Market Report
In May 2024, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development issued guidance clarifying that the Fair Housing Act applies to tenant screening. HUD said overbroad reliance on credit history, eviction records, and criminal records often produces unjustified discriminatory effects, and that companies using AI screening models are expected to design and test them for fair housing compliance. Housing providers must also consider income sources like Housing Choice Vouchers when assessing an applicant’s ability to pay rent.15National Consumer Law Center. HUD Takes Aim at Discriminatory Practices by Tenant Screening Companies and Housing Providers
The National Housing Law Project has argued that automated screening methods “entrench discrimination against poor tenants and tenants of color” by relying on “arbitrary data and racist computer algorithms.”15National Consumer Law Center. HUD Takes Aim at Discriminatory Practices by Tenant Screening Companies and Housing Providers The D.C. case against RentGrow is one of the first attempts to hold a screening company accountable under a state unfair-practices law rather than relying solely on the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act.