A Rhode Island-built rent reporting platform that turns the largest payment most renters make — their monthly rent — into the credit history they need to buy a home, finance a car, or grow a small business. Free for renters served through nonprofit partners.
Rhode Island has a homeownership problem and a credit-access problem — and they compound. A renter paying $1,800–$2,100 a month on time for years has demonstrated extraordinary creditworthiness. Without a credit history, none of it counts toward a mortgage application.
Rhode Islanders with no credit history at any of the three bureaus. The figure rises toward 150,000 when thin-file consumers are included.
CFPB Data Point: Credit Invisibles (2015) · updated June 2025Annual household income required to afford a median-priced single-family home in Rhode Island, against a state median household income of $86,000.
HousingWorks RI 2024 Housing Fact BookNational outcome data from Boom Pay, RentReporters, and the local Stonelink Property Management results — often the difference between a denied and an approved mortgage.
Boom Pay outcome reports · Stonelink PM (Rhode Island)Across every priority city, the household income required to qualify for the median home is roughly double the median renter income. Closing that gap requires getting renters mortgage-ready — and that begins with a credit score.
HousingWorks RI · U.S. Census ACS 5-year · figures rounded for clarityRentCredit RI submits on-time rent payments to Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax on behalf of credit-invisible renters — free when delivered through nonprofit and housing-authority partners. The platform feeds directly into RIHousing's FirstHomes and FirstGenHomeRI mortgage pipelines.
Each step accountable to a specific Rhode Island regulator, partner, or outcome — not a black box.
Operating in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Cape Verdean Creole, Haitian Creole, French, Khmer, Vietnamese, Mandarin, and more — reflecting the actual linguistic landscape of Providence, Pawtucket, Central Falls, Woonsocket, and West Warwick.
Designed for fiscal sustainability from day one. Direct-to-consumer subscriptions and property-manager B2B revenue close the gap as the platform scales — grant dependency falls from 86% in Year 1 to 39% in Year 3.
By Year 3, the program targets ~5,000 active Rhode Island renters and an estimated ~140,000 aggregate FICO points generated — the difference, at scale, between renters denied for a mortgage and renters approved.
Omar Catlin is a Rhode Island-licensed insurance broker and the founder of LifeCatlin Insurance and Project5Pi. He is building RentCredit RI to close the credit-to-homeownership gap in his home state — using locally-deployed AI infrastructure already in production for his other businesses.
RentCredit RI partners with — not against — community organizations. Profits stay in Rhode Island. Outcome data stays in Rhode Island. The platform is operated by a Rhode Island-licensed business, accountable to Rhode Island regulators and Rhode Island funders.
Quarterly updates on funder partnerships, pilot enrollment milestones, and the public launch. No spam. No newsletter. Notifications only.