High discrepancy on credit scores

[Sloedough]

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@Anonymous wrote:

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@Sloedough wrote:

EX usually sees more activity.

That's what my Mortgage guy told me. He told me that EX is usually low and EQ is usually high, so it is important to focus on your TU score because it represent's the median.

This might be due to my area too. Most banks around Colorado pull from EX.

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Hi Sloedough.  Your mortgage lender is mistaken.  There is no particular reason for one credit bureau to be higher for most people than another.  It's odd that so many mortgage lenders, loan officers, reps at CC issuers, and so on will say with confidence completely untrue things about credit reports and scoring -- but it belongs to the amazing but true side of life.

What will indeed cause one score to be higher than another is the data that are on that report (at the moment it is pulled).   What lates are on the report, what accounts, etc.  If you take a guy at random, there is no particlar reason one bureau will look better than another.

The best advice for a person planning to buy a house is to clean up his reports as much as possible, then pull his mortgage scores here -- and then see what his particular middle score is.  That could just as easily be TU, EQ, or EX -- depending on what is in that guy's reports.

PS.  There is also a weird corner case where a person has exactly the same data on all three reports and has an otherwise perfect profile -- in that case Experian will tend to have the highest score and EQ the lowest, since the three mortgage scores have a different top level range.

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Hay, I'm not afaraid to admit when I'm wrong. Thanks for pointing this out.

[sarge12]

I'll just go ahead and state this as a fact. If the credit info on file is exactly the same at all 3 CRA's and they are all pulled on the exact same day, the Fico 08 scores will all be identical. They differ between the 3 because not all creditors report to all 3 CRA's and even those that do is not always updated at each CRA at the same time. When the Fico 08 scores differ between them it is because the data on file at the CRA's are different. The Fico 08 scoring model used at all 3 CRA's are absolutely identical. Now it seems in my case TU seems to be the most updated and will have more data, mainly in inqueries. I suspect that might vary by region, but here it seems more creditors pull TU for CLI's and such. That is a bit strange considering TU is the smallest of the big 3. EX is the largest and EQ is second, but here in South Carolina TU seems to get more pulls.

[Anonymous]

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@sarge12I'll just go ahead and state this as a fact. If the credit info on file is exactly the same at all 3 CRA's and they are all pulled on the exact same day, the Fico 08 scores will all be identical.

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Sarge, I don't believe that this is true 100% of the time.  For example, it's known that EQ penalizes with a lower percentage of accounts reporting balances than does EX/TU.  It may be at 33% rather than 50%.  This means that across 3 identical files, perhaps someone has 1 of 5 cards (20%) reporting a balance.  If this person moves to 2 of 5 (40%) with reported balances, EQ may show a penalty at being > 33% where EX and TU may not at being < 50% still.  Another example would be inquires, which have been documented to carry different weight on different bureaus.  One may cost 7 points on EX, where the same inquiry may only cost 5 on TU, for example.  Overall I get the point you're making, I just don't think it covers absolutely everything.

[iv]

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@sarge12 wrote:

I'll just go ahead and state this as a fact. If the credit info on file is exactly the same at all 3 CRA's and they are all pulled on the exact same day, the Fico 08 scores will all be identical.

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Nope. Much closer with FICO 8 than with previous versions, but exactly identical reports are not guaranteed to produce identical scores. (Very close scores, yes.)

Part of that is also that the "identical data" isn't actually stored exactly the same way on each, as well.