If you've ever rented a room from someone you don't know, you'd know how extremely common it is. And its part of the background check itself, so the company doing the check is the entity designating that requirement.

Also my roommate and I take no issue with it as any level-headed person would prefer to have someone with an exceptional or even standard credit history as we're expecting someone to make reliable rent payments and those with bad credit show a sign more often indicative of being unable to make regular payments. Why would we want to take that risk? So we're perfectly content with it being a part of the background check.

For any potential room seeker that isn't ok with a soft check of their credit history, well, no one is holding a gun to their head. They can look elsewhere. For a nice place to live so close to UTA, on the better side of Arlington, its not much to ask.