Since my first post on Experian’s acquisition of CFSI’s portfolio company, RentBureau, more great news has hit, not just in a press release, but the Baltimore Sun and others have run stories:  As PRBC’s Michael Nathans envisioned, the founders of RentBureau then built and now Experian and VantageScore are realizing, rental payment history can empirically help predict someone’s likely credit repayment behavior.  This is super relevant to the nearly 100 million Americans who rent.  In the past only negative – the failure to pay – rental data was reported.  Now Experian has millions of positive – on-time payments – records as well.  Among the riskiest customers in the Experian file, one in three will move up a risk grade (I’m not clear what that is, exactly) – based on on-time rental payment.  Experian is putting time and money behind this initiative, actively working to expand their RentBureau property.

I would imagine that FICO will soon test the same data and integrate it into their almost ubiquitous Classic score.  But until then VantageScore is the only major score with the power of rent.