My Landlord is spit-roasting me! My automatic payment underpaid my ~$2600 rent by ~$50, and reported that to Transunion. My credit score dropped by 150 points!

Long story short: I live in Southern California, and I pay ~$2600 per month on rent, plus trash/sewer/hot water which gets added to my rent and paid for. I paid for this with an automatic payment that paid up to 2700/month. That 2700 should have been higher, but I forgot to change this when my rent increased from ~2400.

My account with the landlord corporation is paid in full, and had been a week prior to my discovery of the credit report. It seems that my account had a balance due of ~$50 for the month of January. I got a notification from Credit Karma that my score had dropped immensely, by 150 points to be exact, and it was reported to Transunion as a 30+ days missed payment. This really sucks because I was just trying to finance a car, and I now *really* want to move, and my now terrible credit score makes both of those things either hard or impossible.

I wrote the landlord corp an email and got a canned response saying “they report all balances to agencies” and not at all answering my question. When I spoke to an account representative with them, they said there is nothing they can do other than file a dispute with Transunion. I did this, and I received a note from the landlord corporation saying “After reviewing your account, we see no errors in the information that was reported”, and this was quickly followed by a note from Transunion that they closed the dispute and ruled in the landlord’s favor.

There is at least one thing that is factually incorrect about the credit report that they seem to be refusing to acknowledge. The report claims say they collect ~$2600 in rent and have an outstanding balance over 30 days of by ~50 dollars. In actuality, I did pay more than my rent that month ($2700), but not more than the rent combined utilities, which have a total combined rate exceeding ~$2600. So either the amount they charged is incorrect or the amount I underpaid by is incorrect.

I think the main reason I am posting here is to ask… Is anything I can do? Would a lawyer help? Or should I just buckle in and get ready to be financially fucked for the next 7 years over a $50 underpayment on $2,600 in rent. Honestly I feel pretty powerless and frankly framed at the moment.