Landlord hard inquiry??

[Anonymous]

Hi, everyone. I did a search but got some conflicting answers, so I thought I'd ask.

What I want to know is if an inquiry requested by a landlord in order to process an rental application is a hard inquiry that affects your score.

I'm looking at my EQ report from MyFICO, and the inq from my landlord is listed under "Inquiries affecting your FICO score." Right underneath that it says that an inquiry requested by a landlord does not affect your score!

I searched for threads in the forums and saw a couple of different answers. One thread said that landlord inqs are hard inqs but shouldn't affect your score.

I'm super confused. Is this type of inquiry generally supposed to change your score?

If it isn't supposed to, why is it being factored into my score?

[Anonymous]

I have rented many apartments over the years and I find that it depends on how they run your credit.

If they use a program specifically made for apartment complexes to run then the inquiry is soft.

If they do it another method, like direct to the credit report it is a hard hit.

The complex I moved into in August ran a hard hit directly to Experian.

An apartment before that ran me through their computer system on some program like rentpro or something and it was a soft hit.

[Anonymous]

They did for me.  Ran EX.

I just bought a small place in co-op and they ran TU.

I believe the larger complexes do.

[Anonymous]

I've seen that too, where it says inquiries from landlords won't affect your score, yet the last two times I moved, I took a hard inquiry. I also had a hard inquiry from an employer. They don't bother me ATM as I am already chock full of inquiries.

[tdbss]

Yup, did mine.   Fairly large managment company with several propertys.  I wonder if you  could put up a few months cash in advance if this could be averted.

[RobertEG]

The answer, legallly, is that there is no such thing as a "hard" or "soft" pull. Those terms are never mentioned in the FCRA,

The FCRA only regulates the abilitity to acess your credit report.  If you initate a business transaction. (not limited to a only a credit tansaction), then the party has the right to access to your CR  FCRA 604(a)(3)(F)(I).     So I see the request as legit

How they then chose to code the inquiry to your crediit file is NOt a statutory issue.  To get their coding of an inquiry changed is as matter between you and the reporting party to resolve.

The term "hard pull" only means one thing.  The inquiry was reported under a code that the FICO algorithm scores.  If you want to challenge that reportoing. code, then you need to dispute the reporting code with the party who made the inquiry.

[tdbss]

Yes but it is usually a third party company doing the background check, good luck with them fixing that.  Also when your looking for something like a CLI, they don't look at specifics, only plug your information into their calculations and give you an answer of yes or no.  Won't go into specifics and no explaining to them why and will mail you the reason in which you will get in 7-10 business days, at which point you can pull your CR for free, and dispute information if the reporting is correct or not, and you can call that third party person and they will tell you that the reporting is correct.