Tenant screening companies report sealed eviction records because they scrape courts faster than courts seal

Specialty consumer reporting agencies that produce tenant screening reports scrape court records in bulk daily, but courts that seal or expunge eviction cases update their public records on a slower cadence -- sometimes weeks or months later. The result is that a tenant whose eviction was dismissed, sealed, or expunged still shows up as having an eviction record when a landlord runs a background check. Prospective tenants are denied housing based on stale, legally invalid data and often do not even know the screening report exists until after the rejection. Disputing these errors requires identifying which of dozens of obscure screening companies generated the report, then navigating their individual dispute processes. This persists because screening companies have no obligation to re-verify against court records after initial ingestion, and the FCRA's "maximum possible accuracy" standard is rarely enforced against them.