Working with a builder’s in house lending is a battlefield.  Make no mistake about it.  You have to know more than them at all times and watch every move they make.  They may well be highly competent (although very good at disguising this at times) but the issue is they are too busy.  The large publicly traded builders are large companies.  They keep an eye on the bottom line at all times, and as most of us who’ve been in the corporate world know, this often means that staffing is tight.  Fewer people are doing the work.  They’re working long hours and are creating shortcuts to get the job done wherever they can.  What does this translate into for me and you?  Sloppy work and mistakes.

Within the last 7 days, my friendly loan officer has pulled my credit 3 times. 

  1. They pulled it once immediately after signing the contract
  2. Then they changed loan officers on my file, so the new guy pulled it again
  3. He shopped for some loan programs, then pulled it again last night just before submitting my file to underwriting.  His loan software that he plugs my numbers into requires a credit pull.

He tells me the lender we go with will need to pull it themselves again.  So there will be 4 credit pulls on this loan.  There may be more because the lender he is choosing will have to approve of a special “exception” he’s requesting.  In the event they don’t approve it, we’ll have to go to another lender resulting in another credit pull.

What really burns me is that I told the first guy very specifically that I was NOT authorizing him to pull my credit just yet.  I would be telling him all three of my scores, we would shop the loans under that assumption, and at the last minute when he absolutely had to, he could pull the credit.  That guy completely ignored my request and now the new guy did too.

Today when I learned about the 3rd credit pull within the loan officer’s office, I told him that was unacceptable.  Once for him and once for the lender is acceptable, but 3 for him is not.  I told him that after this is done I would be asking him to contact the 3 credit bureaus to have those unauthorized pulls removed.  He stuttered and bumbled a bit and said that he would need to go back through his records to confirm whether or not he was the one that did the credit pulls, because I could be having anyone else pull my credit right now simultaneously and I’m just blaming it on him.  What an idiot.

Let’s put this all into context.  Why do I care about this?  Every month I’m either buying of refinancing something.  If I have 4 credit pulls per transaction, this could be 48 per year, just on real estate alone.  I realize that credit pulls only affect the makeup of your score by a small percentage - I believe 15% of your score is weighted on this.  I also realize that multiple pulls by mortgage companies within a short timeframe (I believe it’s 10 or 14 days) are supposed to be viewed or counted as one.  Supposedly you are not penalized.

Not true!  More and more the lenders are interrogating every credit pull they see on my report and I’ve been having to write letters of explanation about who is pulling my credit and why.  This means I’m expected to know what company pulls my credit on what date, for an entire prior 12 month period.  This is impossible.  I cannot remember nor do I keep track of this.  Plus the cryptic codes on the credit report don’t give me much hint as to who did the pulling.  These lenders are creating the monster and they’re putting the burden of explaining their behavior back on us.  Rediculous to say the least!

OK, my rant’s over.  Watch your back.