TransUnion SmartMove: Features, Pricing, Integrations & AI Visibility

SmartMove is TransUnion’s own online tenant screening for landlords and small property managers. The record describes it as returning credit, criminal, eviction, ResidentScore, Income Insights and identity reports the same day, sold per screening under the SmartCheck name with no setup fee. In the tenant screening category it is the per-report product sold by the bureau itself; RentSpree and RentPrep, the other two per-report vendors, build their reports on TransUnion data. A buyer comparing the three is often comparing the packaging around the same credit file. The facts panel below is rendered from the vendor database with a source and verification date on each entry.

Who it fits

The record tags single-family rental and small multifamily, and the shape of the product says why. There is no subscription, no minimum and no PMS connection in the record. You order a report when an application arrives, decide who pays, read the result in SmartMove or by email, and move the decision into whatever system holds the lease. That works for an owner with one door and for a manager with a few hundred where applications arrive a handful a week.

It fits less well once applications arrive by the dozen or the leasing team runs inside Yardi, RealPage, AppFolio or Buildium, each of which ships its own screening module against the application already in the system. At that size the second question is document fraud, and a bureau report takes an uploaded pay stub at face value. Our research could not reach TransUnion’s enterprise rental screening this cycle, so an operator who wants TransUnion data at portfolio scale should ask TransUnion directly; this profile does not cover that product.

Pricing

Three tiers, all per screening and excluding tax. SmartCheck Basic is $25, Plus is $40 and Premium is $49, with no setup fee. The homepage says you can have the tenant cover the cost of screening or pay for it yourself, so who pays is a setting you choose per application. What each tier contains is not in the record, so ask which reports sit in Basic against Premium, and specifically whether Income Insights and the eviction search are in the tier you would buy. Whether and how much you may charge an applicant is a question for counsel in your state, since application-fee rules vary.

Priced per applicant, SmartMove costs nothing in a month with no applications and $49 a head in a month with many. That is the point at which a manager with steady turnover starts pricing a per-unit subscription instead; run a year of your own application count against both before deciding.

Integrations

The record lists no PMS integration, and the homepage mentions none. The report is a document you read, and the decision is something a person keys into the PMS. If you need the result to land inside the system, the alternatives are the PMS’s own module or a vendor that lists your PMS, such as Rent Butter on AppFolio and Rent Manager. The AppFolio integrations page lists the vendors that connect to that platform across categories.

Limitations and questions to ask

Start with documents. Fake pay stubs are cheap and common, and a bureau report does not examine an uploaded file. Ask what Income Insights is derived from and whether the product does anything with a document the applicant sends you. If the answer is nothing, plan the verification step yourself or read the Payscore profile for the source-verification approach.

Then the score. ResidentScore is TransUnion’s rental-specific score. Ask how it differs from a generic credit score, what it does with a thin file, and how you should write criteria against it so that every applicant is held to the same line. A double deposit for a low score is a workaround operators describe, and it is one to run past counsel.

Then criminal and eviction records. Ask how records are filtered for the jurisdictions you operate in, who maintains the filter, and how a record that should have been excluded gets caught. Ask who the consumer reporting agency is, who issues the adverse-action notice when you decline, and how an applicant disputes an entry. Then ask what delays a same-day report, because the one time it matters is when the applicant’s identity does not verify.

Alternatives

The full tenant screening vendor list compares all nine vendors with the same facts. The closest two are the other per-report products. RentPrep adds an FCRA-certified screener’s review to a TransUnion-based report at $29 to $49 and is delivered through Stessa. RentSpree sells Standard at $39.99 and Comprehensive at $49.99, with the Comprehensive tier adding bank-verified income and reference checks that SmartMove’s record does not describe.

AI visibility

The AI Shortlist Index will measure tenant screening when a prompt set for the category is approved, and the TransUnion SmartMove row will appear here from that edition on.