TransUnion SmartMove Review (2026): The Screening Engine Everyone Resells, and Its $15 Million Receipt

Half the landlord software we cover does not actually screen tenants. It sells you a button, and behind the button sits TransUnion SmartMove. RentRedi, Avail, and Landlord Studio all run their screening through TransUnion’s rental division, which makes SmartMove the most consequential screening product in the independent landlord market and, somehow, the least honestly reviewed. Page 1 of this SERP is screening competitors reviewing their rival plus thin affiliate summaries. None of them mention that the FTC and CFPB took $15 million from the exact TransUnion entity behind SmartMove in October 2023, that criminal records can come back silently blank in a number of states, or that ResidentScore is not a credit score even though it wears a credit score’s clothing.

So this review does the job properly: the real 2026 prices (competitor reviews are still printing a Premium price that died at $41.99), the direct versus reseller math, the ResidentScore decode, and the legal record, dated and sourced.

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SmartMove plans and our verdict at a glance

Pricing below is from mysmartmove.com/pricing, loaded July 26, 2026. All packages are pay per report, plus tax where applicable, with no membership or minimums.

Package	Price (per report)	What you get	Best for
SmartCheck Basic	$25	ResidentScore + criminal background report	Quick pre-screens. Note: no full credit report at this tier
SmartCheck Plus	$40	Basic + full credit report + eviction related proceedings	Most landlords. The first tier with the data you actually need
SmartCheck Premium	$48	Plus + Income Insights + Identity Check (“Best Value” per TransUnion)	Higher rent units where income verification matters

Verdict at a glance	Our take
Score	4.0 / 5
Strongest for	Bureau-direct data, flat transparent pricing, payer flexibility, soft pull, same day reports
Weakest for	State criminal coverage gaps, identity verification friction, zero workflow features, the 2023 enforcement history
Pricing model	Per report, $25 to $48, landlord or applicant pays where permitted
AI claims	None. ResidentScore is marketed as a “proprietary statistical model,” and we respect the honesty
Who should skip it	Landlords who want screening inside a full management workflow, and anyone in a state SmartMove’s criminal coverage misses

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How we researched this review

We have not run a live screening through SmartMove ourselves. This is a research based review: we loaded mysmartmove.com’s pricing, homepage, ResidentScore, and disclaimer pages on July 26, 2026, cross checked them against the FTC and CFPB’s published October 2023 enforcement action, read the complaint record on BiggerPockets and the Better Business Bureau, and compared SmartMove’s direct prices against what its resellers charge on their own live pricing pages. Where a claim comes from a third party rather than TransUnion, we say so and date it.

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What SmartMove actually is

SmartMove is the self service tenant screening product of TransUnion Rental Screening Solutions, Inc. (TURSS), a Greenwood Village, Colorado subsidiary of Trans Union LLC, one of the three national credit bureaus. That parentage is the whole pitch: instead of a middleman assembling data it bought from a bureau, you are buying from the bureau. The applicant enters their own information, verifies their own identity, and authorizes the report, which is why the credit check is a soft pull that does not ding their score, and why the landlord never has to handle a Social Security number.

The reports come in three packages (table above), and TransUnion says most reports are delivered same day. The homepage claims “9 out of 10 users recommend SmartMove to identify great tenants,” which is a vendor run survey from 2019, so treat it as marketing rather than measurement.

What SmartMove is not: a property management platform. There is no listing syndication, no lease, no rent collection, no maintenance ticket. It does one job. Whether that focus is a feature or a limitation depends on whether you already have a platform, and as we cover below, your platform is probably reselling this exact engine anyway.

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Pricing in 2026, and the stale copy problem

The live tiers are $25, $40, and $48. That sentence should not be interesting, but it is, because a good share of the 2026 “SmartMove review” results still print $24.99, $39.99, and $41.99. Premium went from $41.99 to $48 and the review economy never noticed. It is a small, checkable fact, and the pages ranking for this query failed to check it, which tells you how much fact checking went into the rest of their reviews.

The structure underneath the numbers is genuinely landlord friendly. There is no subscription, no minimum volume, and no membership fee. And SmartMove lets you choose who pays: cover the cost yourself or pass it to the applicant where local rules permit. Several states cap what you can charge an applicant for screening, so check your state’s application fee rules before defaulting to applicant pay.

Direct versus reseller: the table nobody publishes

Here is the practical service journalism angle. The platforms below all run TransUnion screening under their own brand, and most charge the applicant more than TransUnion charges at the door.

Where you buy TU screening	Applicant/landlord cost	Source, dated
SmartMove direct	$25 / $40 / $48, payer’s choice where permitted	mysmartmove.com/pricing, Jul 26, 2026 (OFFICIAL)
RentRedi	$39.99, or $49.99 with income verification, tenant paid	rentredi.com, Jul 2026 (OFFICIAL)
Landlord Studio	$45 on paid plans, $55 on the free Go plan	landlordstudio.com, Jul 26, 2026 (OFFICIAL)
TurboTenant	$45 to $55, tenant paid	AITB browser verification, Jul 2026

The delta matters most for the applicants who do not get the unit. A rejected applicant who paid $55 through a platform paid up to $30 more than SmartMove’s Basic price for the privilege of a no. If you screen through a platform for workflow convenience, that is a legitimate trade, but know that the convenience is being billed to your applicants.

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The ResidentScore decode

This is the section that should lead every SmartMove review and leads almost none. The headline number on a SmartMove report is ResidentScore, and it runs on a 350 to 850 scale. That is the same scale as a credit score. It is not a credit score.

On its own product page, TransUnion describes ResidentScore as a proprietary statistical model engineered for rental outcomes, and claims it “predicts evictions 15% more often in comparison to a typical credit score in the bottom 20% score range,” plus 19% more skips. Two things about that claim. First, it is a claim about the riskiest slice of applicants, not about overall accuracy. Second, the research behind it dates to 2016, which the product page itself cites. A decade old validation study is not disqualifying, but no competitor review we found ever dates it, and a model claim from 2016 deserves a timestamp in 2026. TransUnion’s published research describes the model being built from roughly 2.9 million resident records with twelve month lease outcomes.

The practical danger is divergence. Because the scales match, landlords read a ResidentScore of 520 as “bad credit.” Third party reports (LeaseRunner and background check reviewers have published examples) describe applicants with a FICO around 730 surfacing with ResidentScores near 520, because the model weighs rental risk signals differently than lending risk. Those are reported cases, not our testing, but the direction of the risk is structural: if you apply your FICO based approval threshold to a non FICO number, you will reject people your own criteria would have approved.

One more consumer protection point that no page 1 review makes: the score itself cannot be disputed. Under the FCRA an applicant can dispute the underlying tradelines and records, and the score only moves if the inputs change. Consumer law firms including Consumer Attorneys and Lemberg Law run dedicated practice pages for SmartMove report errors, which tells you the dispute volume is real enough to sustain a niche.

Also note the tier trap: SmartCheck Basic shows a ResidentScore and a criminal report but no full credit report. If you buy Basic, the score is the only credit shaped thing you see, with none of the tradeline context needed to sanity check it. That alone is a reason most landlords should treat Plus as the real entry tier.

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The $15 million receipt

Now the legal record, dated and sourced, because a screening review that skips the regulator’s file is not a review.

In October 2023, the FTC and the CFPB announced a joint enforcement action against TransUnion Rental Screening Solutions, Inc. and Trans Union LLC. The order required $15 million in total: $11 million in consumer redress and a $4 million civil penalty to the CFPB. The agencies alleged FCRA violations in tenant screening reports, including inaccurate and incomplete eviction records, multiple entries for the same eviction case, reporting of sealed or expunged records, and failure to disclose the third party vendors supplying public records. The FTC characterized the recovery as the largest in any FTC tenant screening matter to that point (ftc.gov, October 2023; also covered by JD Supra and UPI).

Two framing points, and we mean both of them. First, TURSS is not some sibling entity with a shared logo. It is the exact company that operates SmartMove. When the eviction section of a SmartMove report is the product’s differentiator at the Plus tier, a federal action about eviction record accuracy is directly relevant to what you are buying. Second, in fairness: this is past enforcement with remediation ordered, not a finding about reports generated in 2026. The order compelled process changes, and the entire point of remediation is that the product after the order is supposed to be better than the product before it. We found no public enforcement action against TURSS since.

What it should change about your behavior is modest and concrete: treat the eviction section as a lead to verify, not a verdict. If an eviction record would be the deciding factor in a denial, confirm it against court records before you deny, and remember the FCRA requires an adverse action notice telling the applicant which report you relied on.

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The criminal coverage gap

Here is the quietest limitation in the product. SmartMove’s criminal search is not nationwide in the way landlords assume. The company’s own disclaimer lists the states where criminal records “are available to return,” and a number of states do not appear on that list at all. Third party screening guides have circulated specific lists of excluded jurisdictions over the years, and the commonly cited explanation is that some states charge consumer reporting agencies for criminal record access and SmartMove omits rather than pays. We could not corroborate any specific exclusion list against SmartMove’s current official pages, so we will not print one. The actionable version is simpler anyway: before you rely on the criminal section, open SmartMove’s current disclaimer and confirm your state is on the availability list. If it is not, the criminal report can come back clean because the records were never searched, which is a very different clean than a real one.

There is also a local wrinkle worth knowing: screening rules increasingly constrain how you may use criminal records at all. Cook County, Illinois enforces its Just Housing Amendment, which sequences when criminal history may be considered, and the county describes its enforcement as operating with support from TransUnion (cookcountyil.gov). Wherever you are, your local rules on criminal screening sit on top of whatever the report contains.

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The tool that refuses to say AI

We spend a lot of time on this site auditing AI claims, and SmartMove is the rare vendor with nothing to audit. We loaded mysmartmove.com on July 26, 2026 and found zero AI or machine learning marketing anywhere. The scoring engine is a “proprietary statistical model.” The record matching is an “advanced system.” In a market where a rules based auto tagger gets marketed as AI, the biggest screening engine in the independent landlord space pointedly declining the label is refreshing, and we score the honesty as a plus.

One caveat so the praise does not curdle into naivety: an algorithmic score that gates housing deserves scrutiny whatever its label. A statistical model from a company with a 2023 FCRA settlement should be handled exactly as carefully as anything branded AI. The label is marketing; the accountability question is identical. The broader algorithmic screening story, including the SafeRent settlement that reshaped this category, lives in our best AI tenant screening tools roundup, where SmartMove currently sits at #1 precisely because it makes no AI claims.

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Where SmartMove frustrates people

The complaint record has one dominant pattern: identity verification friction on the applicant side. Because the applicant self verifies, a mismatch as small as an old address or a name variation can strand a screening in “pending identity verification” or end it with “unable to verify,” and the landlord sees nothing but a stalled application. BiggerPockets hosts multiple threads on this, including one titled “Transunion (MySmartMove) Tenant Screening Nightmare” (forum topics 837803 and 103346), and DoorLoop, itself a TransUnion screening reseller, maintains a dedicated help article for the “TransUnion Can’t Verify Identity” error. When the resellers write support docs for your failure mode, the pattern is real.

To keep the frame honest: these are pattern complaints from named public sources, not a measured failure rate, and the flip side of self verification is genuinely good. The soft pull protects the applicant’s credit, the landlord never touches sensitive personal data, and most reports arrive same day per TransUnion.

On reputation scores, the pickings are thin and one of them is a trap. The Better Business Bureau lists TransUnion Rental Screening Solutions as Not Rated, with complaint activity on file (bbb.org, checked July 2026). And a note for anyone Googling: the Trustpilot page that surfaces for “SmartMove” belongs to a UK estate agency at a different domain. It is the wrong company, and any review citing a Trustpilot score for TransUnion SmartMove has confused the two.

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Who should use SmartMove, and who should not

Use SmartMove direct if you self manage a handful of units, you want bureau direct data with a soft pull, and you want control over who pays. It pairs naturally with platforms that do not bundle screening you like, and at $40 for Plus it undercuts what most platforms charge applicants for the same underlying engine.

Use a platform bundle instead if the workflow matters more than the fee: screening stitched to the application, lease, and rent collection in one place. Our reviews of RentRedi (4.1), TurboTenant (4.2), and this batch’s Landlord Studio all cover platforms whose screening buttons ultimately dial TransUnion. Avail is on the same engine too. You are choosing the wrapper, not the data.

Skip SmartMove entirely if your state is missing from its criminal availability list and criminal history is a core part of your screening criteria, or if you need income verification stronger than the Premium tier’s Income Insights estimate, which infers rather than documents income.

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Verdict: 4.0 out of 5

SmartMove earns its position as the default standalone screener. Bureau direct data, honest flat pricing at $25/$40/$48, a soft pull that protects applicants, payer flexibility, same day delivery, and zero AI theater: that is a genuinely strong core, and it is why half the landlord platforms we review resell this engine rather than build their own.

The score stops at 4.0 for reasons this review has documented rather than adjectives. The October 2023 FTC and CFPB action put a $15 million price on eviction record errors at the exact entity behind this product, and even fully remediated, that history obliges verify before deny discipline that the product itself does not prompt. Criminal coverage is not nationwide and fails silently. ResidentScore is systematically misread, and the Basic tier hands you the score without the credit context. Identity verification friction is common enough that resellers document it. And SmartMove does exactly one job, so platforms with screening plus everything else outscore it on breadth.

If you want the same engine inside a workflow, our RentRedi and TurboTenant reviews are the places to start. If you want the engine straight from the bureau at the lowest honest price, this is it.

One closing obligation, because screening is regulated ground: application fees, criminal record use, and adverse action requirements vary by state and city, and this article is about a consumer reporting product, not legal advice. Consult counsel for your state before you build screening criteria around any report, SmartMove’s included.