When
Everybody's
Checking You Out
Checking You Out
An inquiry is a record of someone checking your credit information. Inquiries come in two categories: "hard inquiries" that occur when a business views your credit report for the purpose of an application and "soft inquiries" that occur when your credit is checked for other reasons. I'll be talking about hard inquiries here on this page.
A credit report inquiry appears on your report when creditors, lenders, or other financial institutions request credit information about you for the purpose of extending you. You must explicitly give permission to have your credit run because inquiries negatively affect your credit score because an inquiry will cause your score to temporarily drop a few points.
Hard inquiries (those done by lenders, not you) for credit will negatively impact the score. Each hard inquiry will cost about 5 points on a credit score.
Mortgage and auto inquiries receive special treatment. Up to 20 inquiries can be made in a 14-day period for auto or mortgage and will be treated as only 1 inquiry. The maximum number of inquiries that will reduce the score is 10. Any inquiries beyond that [11+] in a six-month period will have no further impact on the borrower. There's no specific length of time the drop will remain, but you can expect about a month.
The short-coming to this rule is that credit bureaus can not always identify a mortgage or auto related inquiry. Many lending institutions, for instance, offer mortgages. credit cards, and personal loans. These lenders do not have the ability to mark an inquiry as specifically being mortgage related.
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