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A technology company that automates how landlords report tenant payments to the three major credit reporting agencies has scaled its product to meet the integration needs of enterprise-level property management systems, Inman learned in an exclusive press release.
Boom is rolling out what it calls “Rent Reporting-as-a-Service,” an API (application programming interface) that will allow virtually any large-scale property management platform or rent payment gateway to directly embed its payment reporting module.
The benefits of Boom’s update are many, but users should primarily laud it for how it bolsters rent reporting as a standard practice for landlords. Not having to connect payment processes to a third-party rent reporting system greatly reduces friction in the process and should encourage more property managers to promote it to tenants as a leasing incentive.
Austin, Texas-based Boom is one of the few systems that reports to all three bureaus, TransUnion, Equifax and Experian. It also has its own solution for direct rent reporting, Boom for Property Managers.
In the press release, the company’s CEO and co-founder Rob Whiting said that its original industry data partners weren’t capable of helping them scale at the pace the company was seeking.
“It was fine to start,” Whiting said of the industry-standard data furnishers. “But it didn’t scale with enterprise-level volumes.”
“Because each credit bureau handles rental data differently, we worked closely with the teams at each bureau to define the approach, with strong validation from our bureau partners,” he said.
Whiting said that Boom’s solution addresses an industry-wide issue with adopting rent reporting software and that industry software vendors were coming to them frustrated by all the data link-ups required to send accurate tenant payment data to each bureau.
“In launching Rent Reporting-as-a-Service, we saw an opportunity to solve an industry-wide problem while expanding renter access to credit building with rent.”
More proptechs operating in and around the rental industry, with the help of fintechs, are adopting rent reporting as a way to help landlord users pass on a benefit to tenants. The practice emerged, according to Boom, as a result of fintechs’ collective increase in financial data handling and security and the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s support of pending changes to credit score modeling for loans being sold to Fannie, Freddie and other Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs).
Investopedia.com defines a GSE as “a quasi-governmental entity established to enhance the flow of credit to specific sectors of the U.S. economy.“
Boom, which landed $4.5 million in seed funding this past summer, said its rent reporting API will help PMSs send in-time and delinquent payments, collate rent history, plug-in rent reporting authorizations into lease workflows and enable landlords to adjust costs (if included) and pass-through product support, among other benefits.
The product can be up and running in a few weeks and can fit into a wide array of existing tech stacks.
Consistent payments to landlords have long been neglected as a sign of creditworthiness, which is most lenders’ primary decision-making tool for a home loan once a person reaches the level of qualification. Many renters are homebuyers-in-waiting, pushed to the periphery of the market after post-pandemic market trends led to higher rates and reluctant sellers.
Inman reported this week that rents have declined for the fifth consecutive month.
According to a report released Monday by Realtor.com, rents for studio, one-bedroom and two-bedroom units fell 0.7 percent between August and September, with median rents in the 50 most populous United States cities hitting $1,747, down $29 from the peak seen in July 2022.
