From Screening to Eviction: Navigating FCRA Compliance, Rental Junk Fees, and Unlawful Detainer Practice

Residential landlord-tenant practice has fractured into two high-liability fronts most practitioners still treat as unrelated. At the front end, algorithmic screening systems produce reports with the systemic accuracy failures documented in NCLC’s Digital Denials research, and FCRA enforcement under §§ 1681e(b), 1681i, and 1681m now reaches both screening vendors and the landlords who rely on them.

At the back end, just cause eviction regimes — New York’s Good Cause Eviction Act, Colorado HB24-1098, Maryland HB 693 — are expanding while stateslike Florida preempt local protection entirely, and unlawful detainer procedure remains a jurisdiction-specific minefield of notice defects, amendment bars, and dismissal traps. In between, the junk fee crackdown — state AG enforcement, FTC and CFPB action, NCLC’s Too Damn High findings — has turned application fees, amenity charges, and post-tenancy collections into UDAP class action targets.

This program delivers FCRA compliance architecture, the fee typology driving current litigation, state by state UD notice checklists, and habitability and security deposit frameworks now generating affirmative claims with statutory fee-shifting — equipping practitioners to audit screening vendors, identify fee exposure, draft procedurally sound notices, and advise both sides under current law.