I could swear I have heard, recently, of a "new law" that states that as long as mortgage inquiries are all within 30 days they cannot be counted individually toward lowering my score? Experian cust service rep repeatedly insisted that this does not apply to experian, and seemed almost proud that only Experian counts each inquiry separately. Is there really a law governing mortgage inquiries within 30 days and if so, why is Experian clueless about it. My score lowered 8 points from 4 inquiries by two separate creditors.
Not sure about any new law but my understanding was that the FICO model was supposed to be able to detect customers shopping for rates etc and that inquiries for the same type of loan (home, car etc) within a predetermined time would be treated by the model as a single inquiry. Whether this is the case or not is anyone's guess but I would have thought that it's not the CRA's "policy" that is important but the scoring model using data provided by the CRA. Anyone shed any more light on this??
Well I know for sure, since I am trying to re-fi, that Equifax is the only one that does not count them. They show up on Equifax with a code of EU, like this: EU -- Landsafe Credit On EXP and TU they are counting as hards and thereby affecting my score. They are not counting as hard inquiries on EQ.
Isn't the real issue here not how the inquiries are actually coded but how the scoring model treats them?
I dont think its 30 days. As far as I know, all mortgage inquiries done within 14 days are counted as a single inquiry.
Not with TU.. TU counted 3 inquiries for a refi within 10 days on my file as individual ones.... Even in their real FICO (not FAKO) score..
Just to add confusion, I went to a credit seminar at a mortgage conference and was told that it was three weeks. They also said that the same applies for shopping for car loans. Who knows? It's all fuzzy science, nothing makes sense. It wouldn't surprise me at all if each CRA made up its own rules on the matter.
