The Fair Credit Reporting Act and Property Data

Everyone · Updated 2026-10-16

The Fair Credit Reporting Act and Property Data

Information, not legal advice. Laws change; check the current statute or rule and talk to a Texas attorney before you act.

Lists of tax-delinquent owners, foreclosure suits, evictions and judgments are built from public records. That doesn't make them free of federal consumer-reporting law. Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), the same list can be a harmless marketing file or a regulated "consumer report." The difference is how it is used and sold.

What a consumer report is

A consumer report is information from a consumer reporting agency that (15 U.S.C. §1681a(d)):

1. bears on a person's creditworthiness, credit standing, character, general reputation, personal characteristics or mode of living, and
2. is used or expected to be used, or collected, to help decide the person's eligibility for credit, insurance, employment, or another purpose the law allows. Tenant screening is one of those purposes.

A business that regularly assembles or evaluates that kind of information for others is a consumer reporting agency (§1681a(f)). A consumer reporting agency takes on heavy duties: accuracy procedures, permissible-purpose checks, dispute handling and notices.

How property data fits

The FTC staff's 2011 report on the FCRA, 40 Years of Experience with the Fair Credit Reporting Act, explains how this applies to public records:

• Public-record facts about lawsuits and their outcomes, bankruptcies and similar matters do bear on a person's characteristics. So a list of liens, judgments, evictions or foreclosures meets the first part of the test.
• Such a list becomes a consumer report only if it is also used or expected to be used for an eligibility decision.
• A list of names and addresses can be a consumer report if it was built from criteria that are also used in eligibility decisions.
• If information from a consumer report is added to a report that isn't one, the whole report becomes a consumer report. This matters when skip-trace data comes from credit-bureau sources.
• A report used only to locate someone isn't a consumer report.
• Government agencies that provide public records are not consumer reporting agencies.

Plain English: a distress list used to find and market to owners who may want to sell or borrow against their taxes is marketing data. The same list used to approve or turn down a renter, borrower, employee or insurance applicant is a consumer report.

The uses that cross the line

Do not use property or distress data to:

• approve or deny a rental applicant (tenant screening);
• decide whether to lend to someone, or on what terms;
• hire, promote or fire;
• underwrite or price insurance;
• make any other decision about a person's eligibility for something.

For lenders, this is a real distinction. A Texas property tax lender can use a delinquent-tax file to find owners to mail. Deciding whether to make the loan is a separate step and runs through the lender's own underwriting and the rules for that process.

What enforcement has looked like

• Spokeo (2012): paid $800,000 to settle FTC charges that it marketed people-search profiles to HR and recruiting professionals and so acted as a consumer reporting agency without following the FCRA.
• TruthFinder and Instant Checkmate (2023): agreed to a $5.8 million civil penalty in an FTC case. The FTC said a "we are not a consumer reporting agency" disclaimer didn't protect them, because of how they marketed their reports.
• CFPB data-broker proposal: in December 2024 the CFPB proposed a rule that would have treated many data brokers as consumer reporting agencies. It was withdrawn in May 2025.

The lesson from these cases: a disclaimer isn't enough. Regulators look at how a product is marketed and used.

Liability

A person who willfully fails to follow the FCRA can owe actual damages or statutory damages of $100 to $1,000 per consumer, plus punitive damages and attorney's fees (15 U.S.C. §1681n). Negligent violations can bring actual damages and fees (§1681o). Using a consumer report without a permissible purpose (§1681b) is itself a violation.

Good practices for anyone using property data

1. Use it to find and contact owners, research properties and price deals.
2. Never use it to screen people for rentals, credit, jobs or insurance. Use a real consumer reporting agency for those decisions.
3. Know where your contact data comes from. If your skip-trace vendor's phone numbers come from credit-header data, its contract will limit how you can use and share them.
4. Don't resell lists unless your license allows it, and pass the same use limits along to anyone you share with.
5. Watch your words. Marketing that says "screen," "background check" or "tenant history" points toward consumer-report use.

Texas notes

The FCRA is federal and applies the same in Texas. Texas also has its own consumer-reporting provisions in Business & Commerce Code chapter 20, which mostly deal with security freezes and consumer reporting agency duties. Texas privacy and data broker laws are covered in Texas data broker and privacy laws.

How this shows up in Agentix Data

Agentix Data sells public-record property data for real estate marketing and research only: finding owners, researching properties and planning outreach. It is not a consumer reporting agency, and our files may not be used for credit, tenant-screening, employment, insurance or any other eligibility decision. We also don't add skip-traced phones or emails, which keeps credit-header data out of our files.

Sources

• 15 U.S.C. §1681a (definitions): https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/1681a
• 15 U.S.C. §1681b (permissible purposes): https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/1681b
• 15 U.S.C. §1681n and §1681o (liability): https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/1681n , https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/1681o
• FTC staff report, 40 Years of Experience with the Fair Credit Reporting Act (July 2011): https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/reports/40-years-experience-fair-credit-reporting-act-ftc-staff-report-summary-interpretations/110720fcrareport.pdf
• FTC, TruthFinder and Instant Checkmate settlement (Sept. 2023): https://ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/09/ftc-says-truthfinder-instant-checkmate-deceived-users-about-background-report-accuracy-violated-fcra
• Spokeo settlement summary (2012): https://www.mintz.com/insights-center/viewpoints/2012-06-13-spokeo-agrees-800000-ftc-settlement
• CFPB withdrawal of the data-broker proposal (May 2025), summary: https://infobytes.orrick.com/2025-05-16/cfpb-withdraws-its-proposed-rule-on-data-brokers/
• Texas Bus. & Com. Code ch. 20: https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/Docs/BC/htm/BC.20.htm

General information, not legal or financial advice.