Question about inquiries versus reporting

[Lucid08]

While reveiwing my december reports I noticed something odd that I would like some clarification on.

I have a total of 5 installment accounts showing on my EQ reports. 3 are paid in full, while 2 are still being paid on. However, for the 5 accounts that I have in total on my EQ report, only 2 of them show up as inquiries on said EQ report. The other 3 show as inquiries on the 2 other major CRA's with 2 being on EX, and 1 being on TU.

It seems that 3 of the companies that I acquired loans from pulled my CR's from one CRA, yet reported to a different one once the accounts started reporting.

Does the FICO scoring model care about this? It just seems that if a person is dinged when an inquiry shows up on a particular report, that some adverse scoring might be done when an account just shows up out of the blue on a persons CR when there was no inquiry on the same report beforehand. Is there a benefit or detriment to the consumer when companies pull from one CRA, yet report to another?

I hope this question makes sense.

[Junejer]

The creditor can report to any of the CRAs that it desires. They can report to all three, just two, one or none at all. There are no requirements on that whatsoever.

[Lucid08]

Maybe I didnt phrase my question correctly, but I'm wondering about any effects that this might have on the consumer. Both from a scoring perspective and a credit review perspective.

If a company pulls your CR from one CRA, yet reports to a different one once the account starts reporting, it would seem that under a credit review that this could raise some red flags when an account shows up on a persons credit report without the supporting inquiry on the same credit report.

Maybe I'm assuming this wrong, but I know that most companies guage approval based on the presence of recent inquiries on any given credit report, so it stands to reason that if a company puts an inquiry on a different CRA than the one they are reporting to, that this could have a detrimental effect on the consumer for that credit report, especially if they later app for credit from a company who pulls the CR where this inquiry has hit.

It would seem that a person needs to ask two questions of a company before they apply for credit from them:

1) Which CRA do you -report- to, and...

2) Which CRA do you -pull- my CR from?

I'm glad I did this annual review of my credit reports, as I didnt know this was common practice by some companies.

[MidnightVoice]

The majority of creditors report to all three CRAs, and when they look at your report for a credit approval it is pretty automated.  To catch such a discrepancy as you desribe would require a manual review, and if they caught it they could just soft the other CRAs and sort it out.

But I really don't think it makes and significant difference - one inq is not usually a make or break issue.

[haulingthescoreup]

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Lucid08 wrote:

While reveiwing my december reports I noticed something odd that I would like some clarification on.

I have a total of 5 installment accounts showing on my EQ reports. 3 are paid in full, while 2 are still being paid on. However, for the 5 accounts that I have in total on my EQ report, only 2 of them show up as inquiries on said EQ report. The other 3 show as inquiries on the 2 other major CRA's with 2 being on EX, and 1 being on TU.

It seems that 3 of the companies that I acquired loans from pulled my CR's from one CRA, yet reported to a different one once the accounts started reporting.

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Do all five of the installment loans show up on all three reports?

Civilized lenders (unlike Cap One) pull from one CRA, but they report to all three. So of my various new accounts added last spring, I wound up with 4 inqs on EQ, 1 on TU, and 2 on EX for a total of 8 new accounts, all of which report to all three CRA's. (Penfed used one EQ inq for two accounts.)

So if you have 5 loans, it's not at all surprising that you would have 2 inqs on EQ, 1 on TU, and 2 on EX. (2 + 1 + 2 = 5.)

(hope I understood your question correctly!)

[Lucid08]

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@haulingthescoreup wrote:

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@Lucid08 wrote:

While reveiwing my december reports I noticed something odd that I would like some clarification on.

I have a total of 5 installment accounts showing on my EQ reports. 3 are paid in full, while 2 are still being paid on. However, for the 5 accounts that I have in total on my EQ report, only 2 of them show up as inquiries on said EQ report. The other 3 show as inquiries on the 2 other major CRA's with 2 being on EX, and 1 being on TU.

It seems that 3 of the companies that I acquired loans from pulled my CR's from one CRA, yet reported to a different one once the accounts started reporting.

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Do all five of the installment loans show up on all three reports?

Civilized lenders (unlike Cap One) pull from one CRA, but they report to all three. So of my various new accounts added last spring, I wound up with 4 inqs on EQ, 1 on TU, and 2 on EX for a total of 8 new accounts, all of which report to all three CRA's. (Penfed used one EQ inq for two accounts.)

So if you have 5 loans, it's not at all surprising that you would have 2 inqs on EQ, 1 on TU, and 2 on EX. (2 + 1 + 2 = 5.)

(hope I understood your question correctly!)

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No, they do not. Sorry I didnt spell that out in my OP.

It would seem that if a person is apping for credit they would need to know which CRA's a company is going to pull from in order to prevent being turned down due to having too many inquiries showing on a single credit report due to not knowing this before hand. If I ask which credit bureau a company will report to, it might very well be different than the one they -pull- from. Which -could- cause a person to get over loaded on a particular CR for inquiry purposes. I was suprised to find out that companies may very well -pull- from one CRA, yet report to a different one.

[haulingthescoreup]

That's odd that your loans don't all report to all three CRA's, but sometimes loans are a bit more squirrelly than CC's.

But yes, it's a really big deal to know (or make an educated guess) as to which bureau a creditor is likely to pull. Every now and then when application fever sweeps through the CC forum, every third post is along the lines of who does Citi pull.

And it often varies by geographic region and type of card, not just card issuer, so there's always a gambling element involved.

A lot of the "better" cards tend to pull Experian, so some people really get overloaded on EX. TU seems to own the upper Midwest, and a lot of our members up there stagger under the burden of a whole lot of TU inqs. EQ is big in the Southeast, and also among credit unions. And on and on and on!


eta: and to keep us on our toes, some lenders do hard inqs on one CRA and softs on another. So BofA generally pulls EX when you app for real, but when you're playing on their pre-app site, they'll soft you on EQ. USAA generally (not always) pulls EQ when you app, but then they occasionally soft you on EX.

The lenders play the pick-a-CRA game as hard as we do!

Message Edited by haulingthescoreup on 01-14-2009 04:59 PM