What is a hard pull? What is a soft pull?

[bigtim]

I'm not asking where they are located on the CR, or which costs you FICO points etc., I'm aware of that. What I'm asking is, what information is received in a soft pull vs. hard pull if anybody knows.

Thanks much.

[haulingthescoreup]

There are two kinds of soft inqs --promos and account review/ maintenance.

Promo softs are on lists sold to lenders looking for consumers with certain credit profiles --maybe score from 690 - 720, lates over two years old OK, no CA's or public records, etc. (And I just picked those parameters out of the air.) All they get is your name and address, and maybe e-mail (not sure on that one), so that they can woo you.

Account review and account maintenance softs can only legally be done by your current creditors. They show everything, just as if they pulled a hard.

And of course, a hard inq is just that --a full, leisurely examination of your credit history as maintained by the CRA's.

[bigtim]

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@haulingthescoreup wrote:

Account review and account maintenance softs can only legally be done by your current creditors. They show everything, just as if they pulled a hard.

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Thanks. This would make sense, except I've read some posts that state some creditors do a HP for CLI? That wouldn't make sense - for the consumer at least - doing a HP instead of a SP will cost some points obviously, so why do it if it produces the same info? Thanks again...

[haulingthescoreup]

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bigtim wrote:

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@haulingthescoreup wrote:

Account review and account maintenance softs can only legally be done by your current creditors. They show everything, just as if they pulled a hard.

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Thanks. This would make sense, except I've read some posts that state some creditors do a HP for CLI? That wouldn't make sense - for the consumer at least - doing a HP instead of a SP will cost some points obviously, so why do it if it produces the same info? Thanks again...

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My opinion is that they do it because they're meanies. Their version is that asking for a CLI is asking for new (aka, additional) credit, so they do a hard pull.

The function of a hard pull is to show other creditors that you've been looking for credit. That's why they show on your full reports for two years, even though they only count in scoring for one year. Fair enough, I can handle this for requests for genuinely new credit, but I think it's wrong for CLI's. But when the FCRA was written, this wasn't addressed.

btw, we've had members denied for new credit for "too many inquiries" when the inquiries were for mortgage shopping. These (and auto loan inquiries) are "de-duped" by the FICO scoring formula if they occur within a certain window of time, but other lenders' software doesn't recognize this. So the people who were denied have to call back and 'splain to the CSR's that the inquiries were for a new house, not for five different new CC's.

Uneducated consumers are just shark bait these days. I feel badly for those who don't understand how consumer credit works and don't know their rights. It's bad enough for those of us who do know and wind up having to educate CSR's.