Terms of Use

Last updated: October 13, 2026

These Terms are the rules for using The Unit File at www.theunitfile.com (the "site"). The site is run by The Unit File LLC, an Indiana limited liability company ("The Unit File," "we," "us," "our").

Please read them. By using the site, you agree to these Terms, our Privacy Policy and our Site Guidelines. If you don't agree, please don't use the site.

Questions? Email legal@theunitfile.com.

1. What The Unit File is

The Unit File is a rent-history and renter-report site. It helps renters check a building before they sign a lease.

The site lists more than 80,000 apartment buildings across all 50 states and Washington, D.C. We built that list from public listings and U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) data.
Renters can file a report about a building they lived in and share what they paid in rent.
We show those reports, a building summary score (the "Unit Score"), rent figures, and management company pages that group buildings by company. See How Unit Score works.

Landlords can't pay us to remove, hide, bury or change reports. There is no paid removal.

Building details (names, addresses, management companies) come from outside sources and may be out of date or wrong. If you spot a mistake, email us.

2. Who may use the site

You must be at least 18 to use the site or post anything on it.
You must be able to agree to these Terms under the law where you live.
You can't use the site if we have blocked you, or if the law bars you from using it.
If you use the site for a company (for example, a property manager), you agree to these Terms for that company and confirm you have authority to do so.

You don't need an account to read the site, file a report or share what you paid.

Signing in is optional. We use a sign-in provider, Clerk, to handle it. If you sign in, keep your login safe. You're responsible for what happens under your account. Tell us right away if you think someone else is using it.

4. Reports are renters' own opinions

Reports, ratings, "would sign again" answers, tags and comments are the opinions and experiences of the renters who post them. They are not our opinions or statements of fact by us.
We don't fact-check reports. We don't confirm who wrote a report, that they lived at the building, or that what they say is true. Reports carry no verification label, and showing a report doesn't mean we've checked whether it's accurate. The site footer says: "Renter reports are renters' own opinions and experiences. We don't fact-check them. Not legal advice."
The Unit Score is a math summary of renters' category ratings and, once at least 3 renters have answered, the share who would sign again, using the method on our How Unit Score works page. Scores say how many renter reports they come from. A building with too few reports shows "No Unit Score yet." A Unit Score is not an inspection, a rating by us, a certification, or a guarantee about any building or landlord.
Each report shows an overall star score from 1 to 5. It's the average of the categories the renter rated. If the renter rated no categories, it comes from their "would sign again" answer: 4 stars for yes, 2 for no. Details: How star ratings are calculated.
Rent figures are what renters tell us they paid. We don't check them. They are not listing prices, quotes or offers. A year's rent figure appears only after at least 3 renters report it for that year (at least 5 on a unit's page), and it shows the middle (median) amount, rounded to the nearest $25. Anyone can see rent figures; sharing your own is optional.
Use the site as one input. Visit, ask questions and read your lease before you sign.

Company pages and company scores

Which company manages a building comes from public listings. It may be out of date or wrong, and it may not match who managed the building at the time a report describes. Each report reflects the time the renter says they lived there, which may be before the current manager. Companies can send corrections to legal@theunitfile.com.
Company scores. Company pages group buildings that public listings show under the same management company. A company score appears only after at least 10 renter reports across those buildings. It averages renters' 1–5 ratings for management and maintenance, and shows the share who'd sign again and the share who got their deposit back in full. It's a math summary of renters' own reports, which we don't fact-check. It isn't our opinion of the company.
Most-tagged issue shows the issue renters tagged most often in their reports. It comes from renter tags only, not from reading comments, and it isn't a finding by us.
Highest and lowest average rating by city is shown only for a city with at least 10 reports for that company. It averages each report's overall star score, explained in How star ratings are calculated.
Details: How Unit Score works.

5. Not a credit report, not a tenant-screening tool

The Unit File is not a consumer reporting agency. Nothing on the site is a "consumer report" under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA).

You may not use the site or its content to decide whether someone qualifies for housing, credit, insurance or a job, or for any other purpose covered by the FCRA. Use the site for your own research about places you might live.

6. No professional advice

Nothing on the site is legal, financial, tax or housing-counseling advice. We are not a party to any lease, and we are not a landlord, broker or property manager.

7. Your right to post honest reviews

You have the right to share your honest experience as a renter.

Under the federal Consumer Review Fairness Act, a lease or other form contract generally can't stop you from posting an honest review, make you give up the rights to your review, or penalize you for posting it. The FTC's rules also prohibit using threats or intimidation to get reviews removed. These Terms don't take your right away either.

This doesn't protect content that is false, defamatory, harassing, or that breaks the law or our Site Guidelines.

8. What you post: your promises

Before you submit, the form says: "By filing, you agree to the Terms and Guidelines." When you file a report, share rent or upload a photo ("your content"), you agree to these Terms and the Site Guidelines, and you promise that:

You lived there. You were a tenant (or lived in the unit) at the building you're reporting on.
It's your own experience. You're describing what you saw and went through. You're not writing for someone else, and no one paid or rewarded you to write it.
It's honest. You believe what you say is true. Opinions are clearly opinions.
You describe what happened, not conclusions. You don't state crimes, health harms, code or legal violations, or discrimination as facts about a person or company. You say what you saw and went through instead (see "Facts vs. opinions" in the Site Guidelines).
No one's personal information. You don't name or describe individual staff or other private individuals. You don't post phone numbers, email addresses, unit or apartment numbers, license plates, or anything else that identifies a specific person or household. No "doxxing."
Photos are clean. Your photo is one you took or have the right to share. It shows no people's faces, unit or door numbers, names, mail, documents, license plates or other personal information.
It's legal. Your content doesn't break any law or anyone else's rights, including privacy, publicity, copyright and trademark rights.
You're not an insider. You don't own, manage, work for or compete with the building you're reporting on, and you're not posting for anyone who does.

You are responsible for your content. Your name is never shown on a report, but what you write is public. Details like your move-in date, floor plan or a story only you would know may let people who know you, including your landlord, guess it's you.

9. License you give us

You keep ownership of your content.

By posting it, you give The Unit File a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to host, store, copy, display, publish and distribute your content, to format it for display (for example, resizing or compressing a photo), to moderate it, and to use it to calculate scores, rent figures and other summaries. This license covers running and improving the site. We may let our service providers use your content only to help us do these things.

Limits on promotion. We won't use your report in paid advertising in a way that names a specific landlord, management company or building. We won't put your name on your content.

This license lasts while your content is on the site, and after that for backups, records, legal needs and summaries already calculated (such as scores and rent figures that combine many people's data).

You give up any "moral rights" in your content to the extent the law allows, so we can format or hide it as these Terms describe.

10. How we moderate

We don't edit or rewrite what renters write. We either show a report as submitted or hide it.

Photos. We review photos before they appear. A photo appears only after we approve it. We delete rejected photos. Our review only checks for privacy and our photo rules (no faces, unit numbers, documents or content you don't have rights to). Approval doesn't mean we've confirmed what a photo shows, where or when it was taken, or that we agree with the report.

Hiding reports. We may hide a report from public view, in our discretion and in good faith, if we believe it:

is fake or spam (including duplicates, ads, insider or competitor reviews, and reviews written in exchange for a benefit);
is defamatory on its face, harassing, threatening, abusive or obscene;
includes personal information or names a private person, including individual staff;
is discriminatory;
is clearly false or misleading on its face;
is off-topic (not about living at the building); or
is the subject of a copyright or legal request (for example, a valid DMCA notice or court order), or is plainly illegal.

These are the only reasons we hide a report, and they're the same reasons listed in the Site Guidelines. We apply them the same way whether a report is positive or negative. A report's rating or tone is never a reason to hide it. We don't decide who's right about disputed facts, and a report isn't "clearly false" just because someone disagrees with it. Each time we hide a report, we record which reason we used. Hidden reports don't appear on the site and aren't counted in Unit Scores or company scores.

We also remove content when the person who posted it asks us to, when a court orders it, or when the law requires it.

Other points.

We don't have to review every report before it posts, and we may not catch every problem.
We never hide or remove content because a landlord pays us or asks us to.
Moderation decisions are ours. Choosing to hide or not hide something doesn't make us the author of it.

11. Our role as a platform

The Unit File is a platform for content created by renters. Renters, not The Unit File, are responsible for what they post.

Federal law (Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, 47 U.S.C. § 230) generally protects online services from being treated as the publisher or speaker of content posted by their users, and protects good-faith decisions to restrict content. Nothing in these Terms gives up any protection we have under that law or any other law.

12. Disputes and takedown requests

If you believe a report or photo breaks these Terms or the Site Guidelines (for example, it's fake, an insider review, or includes personal information), email legal@theunitfile.com with "Dispute" in the subject line. It's free. We never charge for reviewing a request, and no one can pay to remove, hide or bury a report.

Send us:

the building page link, and which report or photo (the date and a short quote help);
which rule you think it breaks;
why, with any supporting facts. You don't need to, and shouldn't, try to identify the renter or send us tenant information; and
your name, your role (for example, owner, manager, staff) and how to reach you.

What we do and don't do:

We check the report against the reasons in Section 10. We may hide a report or remove a photo that breaks them. Otherwise it stays up.
We don't decide who's right about disputed facts or experiences. We can't investigate what happened in a lease. A report you disagree with, or a negative opinion, isn't a reason to remove it.
We can't contact the renter. Reports are filed without accounts, so we have no way to ask the renter to change, explain or defend a report.
Responses from management. Managers whose authority we've checked can post one free, public "Response from management" under a report. See our Management Account Terms. Responses don't change scores or which reports appear.
Paying makes no difference. There is no paid dispute route. Disputes from management accounts go through this same free process and get no priority.
We aim to reply within about 10 business days. Complex requests may take longer. We don't promise any particular outcome.
We won't tell you, or any manager, who wrote a report unless the law requires it (for example, a valid subpoena or court order). See our Privacy Policy.
Court orders: if a U.S. court has found that a specific report is defamatory or unlawful, send us a copy of the order that identifies the report. We'll remove it. We're not a party to disputes between renters and landlords, and a demand letter or threat of a lawsuit isn't a court order.

Please don't pressure, threaten or offer anything to a renter to change or remove a report.

13. Copyright (DMCA) notices

We respect copyright. We respond to notices of claimed copyright infringement under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. § 512). Our designated agent is registered with the U.S. Copyright Office (registration no. DMCA-1082045):

Service provider: The Unit File LLC
Designated agent: Copyright Agent
5534 Saint Joe Road
Fort Wayne, IN 46835
Email: legal@theunitfile.com

If you email, put "DMCA Notice" in the subject line.

Your notice must include:

your physical or electronic signature;
what copyrighted work you believe was infringed;
the content you want removed and where it is on the site (a link);
your name, mailing address and email address (and a phone number, if you'd like us to be able to call you);
a statement that you believe in good faith the use isn't authorized by the copyright owner, its agent or the law; and
a statement, under penalty of perjury, that your notice is accurate and that you are the owner or authorized to act for the owner.

We may not act on a notice that's missing these items.

Counter-notices. If your content was removed because of a notice and you believe it was a mistake or misidentification, you may send a counter-notice to the agent above. It must include the information required by 17 U.S.C. § 512(g)(3): your signature; what was removed and where it appeared; a statement under penalty of perjury that you believe in good faith it was removed by mistake or misidentification; and your name, address, phone number and consent to the jurisdiction of the federal court for your district (or, if you're outside the U.S., any district where we can be found), and that you'll accept service from the person who sent the notice. We may restore the content as the law allows.

No accounts means we may not be able to reach the uploader. Reports and photos are filed without accounts, and we usually have no contact information for the person who uploaded a photo. So we may be unable to tell them about a notice or forward a counter-notice to them, and a counter-notice process may not be available in practice. Someone who filed a report can still send us a counter-notice directly.

Repeat infringers. We may block users who repeatedly infringe others' copyrights, including by blocking devices or network addresses where we can't link uploads to an account.

14. Things you may not do

You may not:

post fake, duplicate or paid reports, or reports about a building you didn't live in;
post about a building you own, manage, work for or compete with, or ask someone else to;
offer or give money, discounts, gifts or other benefits to get, change or remove a report;
harass, threaten, intimidate or retaliate against anyone, including renters who post;
try to find out who wrote a report;
post anyone's personal information, or names of private individuals;
post hate speech, or content that discriminates against people based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, familial status or any other protected trait;
impersonate anyone or misstate who you are;
get around our spam protections, rate limits or moderation (for example, by using bots, scripts, many devices or VPNs to file reports);
scrape, crawl, copy or download content in bulk, or build a database or competing service from our content, without our written permission;
use the site for tenant screening or any FCRA-covered purpose;
upload malware, or try to break into, overload or interfere with the site;
reverse engineer the site, except as the law allows; or
use the site for anything illegal.

We may hide content, block access or take other steps if we think you've broken these rules.

15. Our content

The site's design, text, logo, the Unit Score and company score methods, and our compilation of building data belong to The Unit File or its licensors. You may view and share links to pages for personal, non-commercial use. Don't copy or reuse our content in other ways without permission.

16. Other services

The site uses outside services (for example, Clerk for sign-in). Links to other websites, and outside services you use, are governed by their own terms. We aren't responsible for them.

17. Paid features

Everything on the site is free right now. We may offer paid features in the future. If we do, we'll post terms for them before they start. No paid feature will ever let anyone remove, hide or bury reports, or change which reports or scores appear.

18. Changes to the site

We may change, pause or stop any part of the site at any time, including features, scores and data sources.

19. Disclaimers

The site and all content are provided "as is" and "as available." To the fullest extent the law allows, we make no warranties, express or implied, including warranties of accuracy, merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title and non-infringement.

We don't promise that:

any report, rating, score, rent figure, building detail or company match is accurate, complete or current;
the site will always be available or free of errors or harmful code; or
any problem will be fixed.

You use the site and make housing decisions at your own risk.

20. Limit on our liability

To the fullest extent the law allows:

The Unit File LLC and its owners, members, employees and agents are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, or for lost profits, revenue, data or goodwill, arising from the site or these Terms, even if we were told they were possible.
We are not liable for content posted by users or for anyone's conduct on or off the site.
Our total liability for all claims about the site or these Terms is limited to the greater of (a) what you paid us in the 12 months before the claim, or (b) $100.

Some places don't allow some of these limits. If so, they apply only as far as the law allows.

21. Indemnity

If someone brings a claim against us because of your content, your use of the site or your breaking of these Terms or the law, you agree to defend and indemnify (cover the costs of) The Unit File LLC and its owners, members, employees and agents. This includes reasonable attorneys' fees. This doesn't apply to the extent the claim was caused by our own willful misconduct. We may choose to control our own defense, and you'll cooperate with us.

22. Ending your use

You can stop using the site at any time. We may suspend or block your access at any time if we think you've broken these Terms or to protect the site or others. Sections that by their nature should continue (such as the license you gave us, disclaimers, limits on liability, indemnity and governing law) continue after your use ends.

23. Governing law and where disputes are heard

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Indiana, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules, and by applicable federal law.

Any lawsuit about the site or these Terms must be brought only in the state courts located in Marion County, Indiana, or the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana. You and we agree to the jurisdiction of those courts.

24. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms. When we do, we'll post the new version here and change the "Last updated" date. If a change is significant, we'll try to give more notice, such as a notice on the site. Changes apply from the date posted and won't apply to disputes that arose before that date. If you keep using the site after changes are posted, you accept the new Terms.

25. Other legal points

These Terms, the Privacy Policy and the Site Guidelines are the whole agreement between you and us about the site.
If any part of these Terms can't be enforced, the rest still applies.
If we don't enforce a part of these Terms right away, we can still enforce it later.
You can't transfer your rights under these Terms. We may transfer ours, for example if the business is sold.
We may contact you electronically, and electronic notices count as "in writing."

26. Contact

The Unit File LLC
3250A West 86th Street #1037
Indianapolis, IN 46268
Email: legal@theunitfile.com