Experian recently announced that it began including residential rental payment data on credit reports as of January 2011. In the past, the only way rental payment information would ever show up on your credit reports was if your account was sent to collections or you were evicted. Nothing positive was ever tracked—only the negative marks.
So for those of you that pay your rent on time but have never had an installment loan or a credit card to help build your credit history, this could potentially be great news! Now you can actually build credit history by simply continuing to pay your rent.
The catch is your landlord needs to report your on-time payments to Experian, and most property owners aren't doing that quite yet. However, Experian does claim that they are currently collecting information for over 8 million renters across the country, and that number could grow dramatically as more large property managers join the reporting trend.
In addition, Experian is the only credit bureau including rental payment data at this time, so your FICO scores and other credit scores or reports from TransUnion and Equifax will continue to exclude this information from your credit history. Regardless, this is certainly a step in the right direction, and it wouldn't be a surprise if both Equifax and TransUnion made the same move in the near future.
