"While few inquiries are fine, too many can result in lowering your credit score and denial of credit. Creditors or potential lenders look at too many inquiries as "desperate" and base part of their decision on those excessive inquiries. In addition, the potential creditor has no idea that those inquiries have not resulted in a recent loan which could disqualify you from being approved. The good news however, is scoring models have now been adjusted to count multiple inquiries within a 14-day period as a single request" www.carreonandassociates.com Topic: Credit Inquiries
For mortgages or car loans, the CRA's by law do not have to count them as one inquiry, there is nothing in the FCRA that says they have to code as one. People complained about inquiries damaging their scores because they were shopping for the best rates for a mortgage. Fair Issac responded to this by claiming somehow their program only counts inq's for mortgage/auto loans as one in a 30/14 day period, so as not penalize those attempting to seek the best interest rates for home or car loans. In my experience, the only CRA that counts as one inq. for home loans in the given time period is EQ. EXP and TU just ignore it. I even called both CRA's explaining that the excessive inq' were a result of a home loan and asked them to recode the excessive inq's, but they wouldn't do anything about it. Probably because it is not law.
I don't know for mortages if it is 14 days or 30 days, I forgot. In any case, I don't think it really matters since the Evil EXP and TU don't do it anyways. At least not in my experience.
I wander if one could win a lawsuit againt the CRA's for this--------> 1) Send a letter to CRA's to investigate the excessive inq(s) as the inq. stemmed from a mortgage/auto loan and it is improperly coded as a "hard" inq. 2) CRA will undoubtedly send a letter refusing to investigate 3) File a small claim because had the CRA investigated, they would have recoded the excessive inquiries to count as one, because their BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP with FAIR ISSAC requires the inq's in a given time period to count as one.