Experian, one of the three big credit bureaus, will begin keeping tabs this year on late consumer rent payments, according to an article today at walletpop.com by Lynette Khalfani-Cox.

Last year, Experian acquired RentBureau, the largest and most widely used credit bureau for the mutli-family industry, the article said. It is a national network of 45 property companies, including large apartment owners and managers, which collects data about rent payments and reports that history to the RentBureau every 24 hours.

"Given that one-third of the U.S. population rents, we felt it was imperative to reflect the true creditworthiness of those individuals who responsibly pay their rent," Brannan Johnston, vice president and managing director, Experian RentBureau, said in a statement.

The article noted that "a spokesperson for FICO - creator of the widely-used FICO credit score - has been quoted in the Baltimore Sun as saying that the issue of including rental payments in FICO's data has to be examined to see if such data is predictive of credit risk."

Although some consumers may fret over Experian including rental payment information in its files, those who pay their rent on time shouldn't be alarmed, the article said, adding that "some industry experts say the inclusion of rental payment data in credit files is actually an enormously positive development for consumers - because it will help banks and other lenders see which consumers are actually quite credit-worthy, even if those individuals don't yet have traditional forms of credit, like credit cards or mortgages."

"We believe that this is a real breakthrough," says Barrett Burns, CEO of VantageScore Solutions. "It's especially great for first-time homebuyer applicants and those trying to establish credit because rent is most likely their biggest obligation."

The VantageScore is a credit score growing in popularity which ranks consumers with a letter grade of A to F, and also on a scale of 501 to 990 points.

"Our belief was that rent payments were very predictive, so we included that in our (credit-scoring) model from the very beginning," Burns said. However, "the volume of data was insignificant," he added, because so it was tough to get landlords to supply data to the credit bureaus.

"Landlords often balked at supplying rental information to the big three credit bureaus," the article said, "for several reasons. First, many landlords didn't like adhering to the rigid data-formatting process required to upload payment data to the credit bureaus. Additionally, landlords are required to update information monthly, to ensure reporting consistently. And landlords must also be willing to be audited in order to furnish data to the bureaus."

"In the past," the article continued, "the only type of rental payment data that the credit bureaus received was the really negative rental behavior - like evictions or collections. For those people paying rent on time, having a good payment track record previously did absolutely nothing for their credit since such payments mostly hadn't been tracked and recorded.

According to the National Multi-Housing Council, there are 96 million renters in the U.S. who aren't getting the credit they deserve because their rental payment data hasn't been accounted for. RentBureau tracks the payment histories of about 8 million renters.