What is a FICO SCORE? 

Well, simply put, it is a sophisticated scoring process which utilizes the information that you would normally review in a credit report, and reduces the content of the report to a score between 300 (Low) and 840 (Perfect) 

“FICO” is an acronym for the “Fair/Isaac Scoring Model”, created by Bill Fair, and Earl Isaac in 1956, and which was originally designed to give a quick score to assess potential credit risks associated with ‘walk-in’ type businesses, such as appliance stores, telephone companies, car dealerships, etc. 

While the Fair/Isaac Score was maligned for years, for inconsistency, limit to bad risk, versus good risk, and its failure to be explained, even by the most savvy of credit managers, in the past 20 years, thousands of new analytical ‘nodes’ have been integrated into the process, which, through these improvements has made the product so bulletproof, that it is now the PRIMARY scoring model for literally all banks, finance companies, car dealerships, and mortgage lenders, nationwide. 

At Rate-A-Renter, we avail ourselves to the Fair/Isaac Rental Scoring Model, which is a proven product, and does two things, very efficiently: 

1.                  Provides the user with a sure-fire, instant decisioning tool which either stops the applicant in its tracks, or provides the basis for further information development.

2.                  It eliminates the need to review a candidates’ credit report, and thus removes not only the time required to review the credit report, but, more importantly, the egregious security requirements now associated with the acquisition, use, handling and maintenance of credit reports, a process which has virtually eliminated access to decisional information of this kind by occasional property owners/managers and individual landlords, because it has become so cumbersome!