Question:
“I recently had a realtor tell me that running my credit multiple times for the purposes of obtaining a home loan/mortgage would not take points off my credit score. Is this true? Is this different than having my credit run several times for, say, an auto loan?”
Answer:
That Realtor was correct. To get you the most accurate answer, I emailed my trusted lender and here’s what he sent me:
Looking for a mortgage or an auto loan may cause multiple lenders to request your credit report, even though you’re only looking for one loan. To compensate for this, the score ignores all mortgage and auto inquiries made in the 30 days prior to scoring. So if you find a loan within 30 days, the inquiries won’t affect your score while you’re rate shopping.
In addition, the score looks on your credit report for auto or mortgage inquiries older than 30 days. If it finds some, it counts all those inquiries that fall in a typical shopping period as just one inquiry when determining your score. For FICO® scores calculated from older versions of the scoring formula, this shopping period is any 14 day span.
For FICO® scores calculated from the newest versions of the scoring formula, this shopping period is any 45 day span. Each lender chooses which version of the FICO® scoring formula it wants the credit reporting agency to use to calculate your FICO® score.
