Loan applications

[Anonymous]

In shopping for best interest rate (in my case an RV), I was told as long as you have your credit pulled for same type of loan within a few weeks it counts as one pull? If this is the case, would everyone else after the first application pull see a lower credit score or does it not drop score right away? Example: first lender pulls scores and they are at 760. Two days later second lender pulls it's now 750 due to hard pull from first lender.

[RobertEG]

The scoring by FICO of multiple inquiries as a single inquiry (referred to by FICO as "de-duping") is limited to auto, student, or mortgage loans, and applies to inquries made within a sliding window that varies by scoring model number.

The key is whether the inquiry is coded, in this case, as an auto loan.

I am unsure if recreational vehicle loans are properly included as being an auto loan under CRA guidelines.

If not coded as an auto loan, the multiple inquires will not be de-duped.

[Anonymous]

Hi Robert.  There are two questions in our OP's post -- one implicit and the other explicit.

(1)  The implicit question is whether an RV counts as an auto loan and will therefore be de-duped.

(2)  The explicit question is whether the score generated by the first inquiry will be based on a report with zero inquiries whereas the score generated by inquiries 2-20 will be based de facto on a report with one scoreable inquiry.  And thus the very first inquiry might result in a higher score than all the rest.  (If the report had X inquiries before the first auto inquiry, then it would X for the first score and X+1 for all the rest.)

I have never thought about question #2 as it touches auto loans.  If it were mortgages, then the scores generated by all of the mortgage inquiries would be based on a report with the same number of scoreable inquiries, since FICO adds an additional rule which is to ignore all mortgage inquiries generated in the last 30 days.  I don't think auto inquiries have that 30 day rule, however, so our OP's conjecture seems to me likely to be true.

Curious to hear if anyone knows for sure.