Do Resolved Disputes affect credit?

[Anonymous]

Long story short, I am in the process of buying a house. I have 5 disputes that are over a year old.  They are no longer active, but the remarks from the investigation is left. 

If I remove the remarks, will that affect my credit score?  I recently did this for Equifax but I believe they were active disputes and that caused my score to drop 40 points. I followed suit with TR and nothing happened to my score at all.  I am super nervous about this and not sure how to gauge whether it will affect my score or not.

I'm assuming that if the disputes close the negative account begins to ding the credit from that point?  Is that correct?

[Anonymous]

Remarks are not considered as far as scoring goes.  The account data (clean, dirty, etc) is what matters.  Keep in mind upon a manual review that remarks can be seen of course and if you were applying for major loan you could be asked about them.

[Anonymous]

So if the dispute is not active and only the remark is left over my score will remain the same when I remove the remarks?

[Anonymous]

I have heard that disputed accounts can be excluded from consideration by the algorithm.  That being said, if you have a dirty account that drops your score (say) 60 points and disputing it [temporarily] raises your score 60 points, if the dispute ends and the negative information isn't removed one would expect their score to drop 60 points back to the starting point.  The comments that remain following the dispute will not have a scoring impact.

[Anonymous]

Perfect that answers my question.  These disputes were ended over a year ago, so they already did their damage and removing the remarks should have no score effect.

[Anonymous]

How did everything turn out?

[Anonymous]

This is a common problem with people getting mortgages and having old disputes left over; there is a link I believe in post 7 of the Scoring Primer that addresses having them removed. Most lenders want them all removed.