It’s the first step most prospective buyers need to take before they even start looking at homes: Call a lender and get pre-approved to purchase a property. You need to know what your monthly payment will look like compared to your income, and your REALTOR® needs to have a strong basis for your price point in order to make sure that your time house hunting is well spent.

The Surprising Downside of Frugality

The first thing a lender does when reviewing your financial outlook is check your credit report.  Unfortunately for many of today’s first time home buyers, having a strong credit history is hard to come by. In general young adults, i.e. millennials, tend to be financially conservative. Considering most young adults must take on large student loan debt in order to complete their education, it’s not surprising they tend to visit website and avoid consumer debt and only buy what they can afford, often in cash. They supremely dislike the idea of paying interest into the pockets of large corporations, and truly understand the risks of revolving debt.  

These choices sound healthy, right? Unfortunately, if you haven’t made purchases with credit and paid them off successfully over time, you won’t have much of a credit history to assess. As many millenials have found, it’s very difficult to buy a house or car with a weak or limited credit history.

Zingo Improves Your Credit Score

But wait! Most young adults dutifully pay rent and utilities every month. However, credit bureaus rarely track these payments. That’s where Zingo comes in. Zingo helps you automatically report your rent payments (and soon utility payments as well) to credit bureaus.

After evaluating the ins and outs of this financial service, Living Room Realty has teamed up with Zingo to help renters improve their credit score, so they can be in a better position to buy their first home. 

More details about Zingo:

• You must be at least 18 years old to enter into an agreement with Zingo.
• There generally is no charge to set up your account and begin reporting your current rental payments to the credit bureaus. If Zingo is unable to validate your rental data through their automated process, they may need to reach out to you for further information. If a manual process is required for verification, there will be a one-time fee of $19.95.
• Zingo can only report rental payments made to professional property management companies, not to private landlords. You can report previous payments to your current address as far back as 24 months.
• You can add past rental payments for a different address, for a charge of $29.95 per address.
• Currently Zingo is only able to report your rental payment data paid through financial institutions (no cash payments). Soon, they will be able to report utilities, insurance and more. When signing up, please enter all recurring payments including utilities and other recurring payments. Once the bureaus give Zingo the go ahead, they will begin reporting these additional payments as well.
• Zingo currently reports to Equifax and TransUnion and expects to be able to report to Experian soon.
• Once set up, your payments are automatically reported to the credit bureaus on a monthly basis.
• Zingo uses bank-strength, 128-bit encryption to keep your data safe. They do not sell your data.

We are so excited about this new service. We want to help renters achieve their dream of home ownership. After all, why shouldn’t your responsible, monthly payments for rent and utilities improve your credit score? For more information and to sign up, go to www.livingroomre.zingocredit.com.