So I pulled my three credit reports this evening. I counted up the soft pulls across all three CRA’s since the beginning of 2014.
Here’s what I came up with:
Cap One (2 cards) 11111111
Chase (2 cards) 1111111
Discover (1 card) 11111
BOA (1 card) 1111
Citi (1 card) 1111
Barclays (2 cards) 111
Lowes (1 card) 11
FIA (1 card) 1
US Bank (2 cards) 1
Nasa FCU (1 card) 1
AMEX (2 cards) 1
A couple of things that popped out. Chase has SP’ed me A LOT recently. 5 times since October 1st (again across all three bureaus)…wonder what that’s about.
Cap One seems to soft pull me just about every month. And finally AMEX has only pulled me once, which really surprised me because they have approved me for two 3x CLI’s since March 2014.
Do these number of pulls seem “normal”, especially Chase and Cap One? Has anyone else looked at their SP’s and counted? I wonder if there a correlation between number of SP and potential AA?
@Kenny wrote:
Capital One SP can be attributed to the FAKO each month, no?
Kenny-
The CAP 1 FAKO pulls are coded differently. It is listed as "TU INTERACTIVE/CAP 1" and purpose is listed as "CREDIT MONITORING". Credit Karma pulls are coded in the same way. The ones listed above are strictly from the lenders (not credit monitoring services).
Yeah the Cap One SP are curious because I've been with them for many years and looking back on previous reports, they've only pulled me 2-3 times a year. Granted, I had a $500 CL with them at that time. Now I have two cards: Venture ($10,000 CL) and QS1 ($2,000 CL), so maybe it's the increased exposure? I PIF every month, but maybe that doesn't matter...
I'm not nervous about it. My overall UTL is pretty low (~7%). I'm running a few balances to utilize the 0% promos, and even those I make sure those never go above 50% individually. But I am curious if other see this level of soft pull "activity" on their reports.
@Anonymous wrote:
Do the soft pulls from Chase happen to have any correlation to anniversary's of your cards or anything like that?
I do not see any discernible patterns from Chase. I recently put balances on both Freedom and Slate (to take advantage of 0% promo), so maybe that's it?
Freedom has a balance ($2000/6000 CL) and so does Slate ($1500/5000 CL).
@elim wrote:have you been hitting chase pre-qual regularly?
I thought about that, but the dates don't seem to match so I don't think that's it.
@takeshi74 wrote:There's really no "normal". They can and do vary. Don't obsess over the SP's.
@Dw4250 wrote:I wonder if there a correlation between number of SP and potential AA?
There's no direct causality. It's the state of one's credit that creditors use to decide to take AA. SP's are done all the time for purposes other than AA. Number of SP's on its own doesn't mean anything other than you've been SP'ed that number of times.
Thx takeshi74. I figured the SP's could be for a variety of reasons. It does seem there really is no "normal".