Tenant background checks, as one API call
Criminal records across more than a thousand county, state and federal jurisdictions and 58 US sex offender registries — the two checks a rental product is asked for — behind a single integration and a single key.
No card, no sales call. $0.15 a call, $0.11 past 2,000 a month.
curl -sS https://api.offendersearch.app/v1/criminal/search \
-H "X-API-Key: $OFFENDERSEARCH_KEY" \
-G --data-urlencode "name=Alex Moreno" \
--data-urlencode "state=AZ"Two checks, one integration
US criminal records are published by more than a thousand separate authorities. Absorbing that is our product; for a rental platform it is a year that never reaches a customer.
Both checks, one credential
Criminal records across more than a thousand county, state and federal jurisdictions and 58 US sex offender registries on the same key and the same account. For a rental product these are two features and one integration.
Address-level answers
The registry side carries addresses, so a tenancy product can answer proximity questions its users actually ask — not just whether a name matched somewhere in the country.
Coverage your product can display
GET /v1/criminal/sources lists every jurisdiction, live or pending. You can show a landlord exactly what a screening covered instead of asking them to trust a badge.
Per-check pricing that resells
Tenant screening retails at $25–$45. At 5,000 checks a month the data costs about 12.6 cents each, so the margin lives in your product rather than in your vendor contract.
Priced to resell
Tenant screening retails at $25–$45. Here is what the data underneath it actually costs you.
| Screenings / month | Your cost | Per screening |
|---|---|---|
| 500 | $75.00 | $0.1500 |
| 5,000 | $630.00 | $0.1260 |
| 50,000 | $5,580.00 | $0.1116 |
No setup fee, per-seat licence, minimum or annual contract. Full pricing.
The county layer, in the biggest markets
Most US criminal matters begin in a county system, so that is where a tenancy check needs reach. These are the states contributing the most county jurisdictions to the roster.
| State | County jurisdictions | Statewide prison | Warrants |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kentucky | 71 | Yes | — |
| Montana | 68 | Yes | — |
| Colorado | 66 | Yes | Yes |
| Pennsylvania | 65 | Yes | Yes |
| Texas | 65 | Yes | Yes |
| California | 59 | Yes | — |
| New York | 59 | Yes | — |
| Ohio | 51 | Yes | — |
1,375 county jurisdictions in total — see every state.
You run the process; we make it defensible
We are the records layer, not a consumer reporting agency, and our results are not a consumer report — FCRA process stays with the operator. What you get is what makes that process hold up: every record typed by kind, attributed to a named jurisdiction and returned with a citation, plus a per-response count of what was searched.
- Show a landlord precisely which jurisdictions a screening reached
- Re-verify any record at its source from the citation, months later
- Treat arrests and convictions differently by design, using
kind - Trust & HIPAA answers enterprise security review; BAA available
Tenant screening questions
What does a tenancy check reach?
Criminal records across more than a thousand county, state and federal jurisdictions — county jail rosters, statewide prison systems, court records and warrants — plus the sex offender registry search across 58 US registries with photographs, aliases and addresses. One key covers both.
How fast can we ship it?
One endpoint, one key, one response shape. There is a free trial of 25 searches with no card and no sales call, so a developer can prove the integration before anyone signs anything. Teams already calling our registry search add criminal without a new credential or a migration.
What does it cost at volume?
Every call is $0.15, dropping to $0.11 for every call past 2,000 in a calendar month. At 5,000 screenings a month that is $630.00 — roughly 12.6 cents a screening — with no setup fee, per-seat licence, minimum or annual contract. Batches are billed per row.
Is Offendersearch a tenant screening company?
No — we are the records layer your product calls. A tenant screening company is typically a consumer reporting agency: it assembles consumer reports and runs FCRA process. We are not a CRA and our results are not a consumer report, so that process stays with the operator. Most of our rental customers are platforms running their own compliant flow who wanted data they could audit.
How do we avoid over-reading an arrest record?
Every record is typed by kind — a jail booking is arrest-stage, a court record carries the disposition — and cited to the jurisdiction holding it. Your adjudication rules can treat them differently by design, which is what a challenged decision needs you to be able to demonstrate.
Can we screen an existing tenant base in bulk?
Yes — POST a batch and each row is billed as one call, with errored rows reported and not billed. Periodic re-screening of a portfolio is a common use of it, and it costs the same per person as a one-off lookup.