Fico score question and mortgage lenders

Question

Sorry so long...I've been slowly but surely building my credit up.  I subscribe to USAA's credit monitoring service which goes thru Experian and allows all 3 credit scores every 30 days.  Last month, my scores were 680+ on 2 (Equifax and Transunion) and 620 on Experian because of a recent collection.  My loan officer pulled my credit and agreed.  He said I was good as long as 2 of the bureaus were 680 or above.  I disputed the recent collection and it was removed.  I pulled my credit score for Experian again and it went to 680.  Last night my loan officier sent me the inital loan documents and I saw that my interest rate had increased by .25% and only my Equifax was over 680.  My Transunion had dropped to 673 and my Experian still showed 620.  I asked him about it today and he said that he pulled my scores 2 days ago and these were the new scores.  Neither I nor him could find a reason why my scores went down.  I get alerts whenever anything hits my credit and I haven't had any inquires or new lines of credit since I started the loan process. My questions are: 1. Does the mortage company use a different algorithm then credit monitoring services, ie, Experian2.  Why would my score change but neither one of us see a difference in my credit report explaining why. 

Answer 1

Comments inline. gettinto800 wrote:
Others have more expertise but here's what I've learned as we are going through the mortgage process. Your LO should give you a copy of the credit report he pulled. They pull mortgage scores. On the credit report it will show you what they pulled. Most LO use a credit pulling firm to pull. It will say like FICO-II TU CLASSIC 04 BEACON 5 etc. A) Be careful with your LO doing too many hard pulls. This alone can hurt your credit. When he pulled the credit report and the numbers/your score was good -- why wouldn't he just use that? I don't understand that. A credit pull by a lender is good for 90 days. To pull again 2 days later doesn't make sense. Even if it was just a "soft pull" on there part or an "update" pull to your score. Others can comment on this but to me it seems strange to pull 2 days later. Unless it was a "rapid rescore," maybe? Which is hit and miss from what I've read. Not sure why they did a double-tap, but doesn't matter: grace period of 30 days if the mortgage inquiries are properly coded (all mine were from 3 different lenders) and there's a 14-45 day rollup period where it will only count as a single scorable inquiry.   B) If your score changes and you don't know why -- it could be the inquiry it could be a mystery! This is what is so hard, I'm finding, in doing the mortgage process. They use different scores and it's very hard to get an accurate picture of what's going on. I've had no luck with MyFico alerts. It will claim more score jumps 7 points because of an address change. Really? (It was a typo that somehow got on there, I have no idea, I never changed my address). You would have to pull your reports (which is a soft pull and doesn't impact you) and analyze it and compare it to the previous one to figure it out and you still might not know.  You're right on both counts that take the alerts with a grain of salt, the scores are different; however, FICO isn't capricious, if you have access to the base data it can be figured out virtually every time.  Something changed to account for a 7 point difference, might be small and hard to spot (age of tradelines or what not) or something obvious like a balance change. That said, to me, 673 vs 680 doesn't seem like that much. I don't know if that should equal a .25% rate change. Maybe, I don't know enough about that. Maybe you're in a different tier then. Not sure. That said, if you look at your UTI and stuff hopefully you could get it back up there.  680 is a Tier for virtually every mortgage lender on the planet.  Certainly is for conventional and I think FHA loans too though I don't know those as well.  To us as consumers, a 7 point swing is whatever, except when we're in the mortgage process and playing on a tier boundary without a gold-plated score to begin with... then it matters a great deal.  Big enough that if it were me I'd be scrutenizing my reports, and if it were fixable I'd do so and have them pull again.