FICO decrease because mortgage servicer changed

[Anonymous]

I was just notified that my score decreased because BofA sold my mortgage to GreenTree servicing. I have no control over this. There's no deliquency on the account and there never has been.  The decrease put me over an important credit threshold. Is there anything I can do about this?

[Lel]

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@Anonymous wrote:

I was just notified that my score decreased because BofA sold my mortgage to GreenTree servicing. I have no control over this. There's no deliquency on the account and there never has been.  The decrease put me over an important credit threshold. Is there anything I can do about this?

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Hello, and welcome to the FICO Forums.

Was this a Score Watch alert from this site that informed you of this change, or was it an alert from a different credit monitoring site?

What exactly did the alert say?

Was a new account created when the mortgage was sold to GreenTree?

[Anonymous]

Thanks for answering.

Yes, it was a Score Watch alert.

When I drill down into the details, the "description" row under the "Newly reported" column says

"Account transferred or sold Real estate mortgage"

[Lel]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Thanks for answering.

Yes, it was a Score Watch alert.

When I drill down into the details, the "description" row under the "Newly reported" column says

"Account transferred or sold Real estate mortgage"

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The big question now is whether a new account was created when the account was transferred.  Have you looked at your actual credit report to see if there is a new account?

One thing about Score Watch alerts is that there isn't necessarily a cause-and-effect relationship between a change in one's credit report and a change in one's score.  That's why the SW alerts always read, "this score decrease may be caused by this new reason" or something similar.  That is, even though the account was transferred, it may not actually be responsible for the change in score.  There could be other changes on your credit report that might be responsible for the score drop.  Thus, it would be advisable to take a look at your current credit report and compare it to your prior reports to see where the differences lie.

[Anonymous]

I don't know for sure if a new account was created or not, but it seems logical that it would be a new account if it's a different company. Still sucks since it's not something I have any control over.

[Lel]

Sometimes these transfers don't necessarily result in the creation of a new account.  My mortgage was switched from one servicer to another (and it's supposed to be changing again soon).  I got a new account number during the initial switch and the creditor's name is different, but the new credit report entry replaced the old one.  The same open date and payment history was transferred to the new account entry, and the old account number disappeared from my credit report.

A similar thing happened when a credit card account was sold from one company to another.  New account number, but it didn't appear as a new credit account on my reports.

It is certainly possible that you have a new account on your file, and your old account is now listed as closed.  And it is possible that this may be responsible for your score change.  But without actually taking a look at your credit reports, this is all just speculation.