Question about collection accounts and different flavors of FICO

[Anonymous]

Hi all! I'm currently applying for a home loan and hoping someone can help me with the following. I have a small (<$100) collection account on my credit report. Yes, I should have just paid up for the book the library said I didn't return, but I didn't, so now unfortunately I have to deal with this dragging down my credit score. The lender originally ran my credit when there was a dispute on file regarding the collection account. Then the lender asked me to remove the dispute, which I did, and they are now preparing to run my credit again.

Well, my score is right on the borderline where I'm going to have to start paying more for credit if it goes down any further, and I'm aware that removing the dispute may drag down my score. This would not happen under FICO 08, which ignores small collection accounts like this one, but between the different bureaus, my lender is using a mixture of FICO 98 and FICO 04. So this is basically a technical question for someone familiar with these scoring models. If you have a collection account that is disputed, and then you remove the dispute, would your score go down under these models? As I said, I'm asking this so I don't waste a credit pull, because if my score goes down further on account of this then I'm going to have to find a new lender who uses a newer scoring model.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[CreditDunce]

I am not an expert, but I am fairly confident your score will go down even with a nuisance collection with the 98/04 FICO models.  Moreover, I don't know of any mortgage lenders that use FICO 08.  If you find any please post to let us know.  It would be very helpful.

You might want to look in the rebuilding section for information on PFD or DV.   If possible, having the collection permanently removed will probably be the best way to handle this.

[Anonymous]

Thanks. In case any one else comes to this thread looking for info, I think it's very likely that my previous score, which I checked when the collection account was in dispute, already reflects the decrease. I can't find any way to check my FICO 04 score for Transunion or Experian on my own, but I did check Equifax (in my case the only agency that wasn't reporting the collection account), and it's about 100 points higher than Transunion or Experian. So could the score from those two agencies go down any further when the dispute is taken off? I doubt it...

Also, from all the research I've done, it looks like some local credit unions might use FICO 08, but that's about it. If anybody has any other useful info, please post here!