Can you authorize a soft inquiry before applying for a loan or credit card?

[Thunderseven]

To avoid a hard inquiry, can you authorize a soft inquiry prior to applying for a loan or credit card?  Is this legal?  Will they even consider it?  Does it provide them with the same information required to make a decision?  Just curious if this wouldn't be another safe approach to acquiring credit without doing damage to your CR.

[Thunderseven]

Will look elsewhere for my answer.  Thanks anyway!

[score_building]

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@Thunderseven wrote:

To avoid a hard inquiry, can you authorize a soft inquiry prior to applying for a loan or credit card?  Is this legal?  Will they even consider it?  Does it provide them with the same information required to make a decision?  Just curious if this wouldn't be another safe approach to acquiring credit without doing damage to your CR.

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no.  in order to apply for new credit any issuer will insist on placing a hard inquiry. an exception that comes to mind is with CU's where they may pull a hard for membership application and then let you subsequently apply for products under that one initial membership app. hard inquiry.

for credit limit increases, once you have already obtained a cl, it is up to the individual issuer whether to soft or hard for a cli and typically they will not be responsive to requests for softs if it is their policy to hard for cli's.

Message Edited by score_building on 11-04-2008 08:24 AM

[Thunderseven]

I do have an application for a CC with my CU, but I'm holding it until I hear back on a couple of letters I sent last week.  I'd like to see a few more changes on my CR before applying.  Thanks for the info.