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Certain AU accounts "count" and certain ones don't. If the account is being counted, it will impact your utilization, age of accounts factors, etc. As far as whether or not a "counted" AU account is factored into a lending decision, that would really matter on a lender-specific level. Some computers may value it well and it could help, where upon a MR a human being could discount the account entirely knowing that it's sort of artificially impacting your own profile.
To be excruciatingly clear though, AU's count full monty on everything before FICO 8; namely, 99.99% of the mortgage underwriting in the US they will count.
FICO 8 has an anti-abuse algorithm and I believe FICO 9 has the same though there were some early reports of it's counting differently nothing came of that.
It's also worth noting that mortgages always involve a MR by a human being, so they'll able to "see through" the artificial gain from an AU account. It will still positively impact all mortgage scores, though, so improving that middle score is always a great thing.
@Anonymous wrote:
Very interesting, I have not yet heard that AAoA was a scorecard segmentation factor. Correct me if I’m wrong, I thought it was 1. clean/derogatory, 2. Young or old (AooA), 3. thick/thin, 4. new accounts/no new accounts.
I thought those factors were scorecard determinates and that then based on other factors within that scorecard, your score was determined. Please correct me and instruct me where I am wrong or misunderstand.
Hrm well I may have somewhat misspoke there but going through it: i'm not sure if thick / thin factors at all though we've seen some strangeness; however, given how so much of the algorithm is percentage based it shows up in other ways and we've seen max scores with 2 credit cards only IIRC.
Derogatory scorecards: type of derogatory (public record / collection or deliquency) and some factor of age presumably of the derogatory though we don't know what that breakpoint is and might be different based on type of derogatory.
It doesn't break down into 4 nice neat bins though I don't think on the clean scorecards: 30D lates play there too. New accounts matter on all models and I think oldest does on some, but thick/thin I'm kinda dubious on for several reasons, and AAOA dominates the reason codes for me certainly and it might be some combination of oldest / AAOA or even just AAOA on the newer models.
TT has some good pictures but I don't think there's a pat answer on the age factors and we certainly don't have a great idea on the AAOA breakpoints... though it does appear that length of revolver / installment tradelines which might well be AOOA do factor in the Industry Option scorecards for FICO 8, and that might be precisely oldest account but I don't recall ever seeing those reason codes in the classic score.
I'm sure TT will disabuse me if I'm wrong here .