Landlords often perform credit checks, because your credit history reflects your reliability to make payments. However, this credit check lowers your credit score. Apartment managers can perform a credit check even if you do not specifically grant permission to do so. The effect on your credit is minimal, so you may not have to worry unless you have poor credit.
Identification
Credit checks by a landlord appear as a hard inquiry and affect your credit score, according to Bankrate. Hard inquiries usually occur when you submit an application for something. Conversely, a credit check not related to an application, called a soft pull, has no effect on your score.
Effects
A credit check negatively affects your score by no more than five points and only for a year, according to Bankrate. The FICO scoring model scores range from 300 to 850, so five points probably won't affect whether a lender will extend credit to you or require you to pay a higher interest rate.
Potential
While an individual credit check is relatively harmless, too many credit checks could cause noticeable damage to your score, because reliable borrowers do not submit frequent applications for credit. The FICO formula weighs credit checks based on the rest of your credit information, so you should keep inquiries to a minimum.
Tip
Review your credit report and any inquiries to make sure any checks resulting from a rental application are correctly assigned to you. If someone pulls your report even though you never applied for a residence, you can write a letter to the landlord asking him to remove the inquiry, or you can dispute the inquiry directly with the credit rating bureaus.
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