How do you shop for a mortgage without

each bank running your credit everytime. How do you know that you are getting the best interest rate? i want to shop around but i hate that everytime you want to get a pre-approval they run your credit and then in turn you credit score goes down. Any tips or suggestion on where to go to get a great rate. Our credit is excellent.

Re: How do you shop for a mortgage without

I have one bank pull the credit and give the median scores to the other banks knowing that it could be different at the time they actually pull the credit if we decide to go with them.

I tell the bankers to use those credit scores that I've gotten before if it's a reasonable time frame.

Re: How do you shop for a mortgage without

I was told that you have a window of about 14 days where your credit can be run several times in a row and it will show up as just once - since it is assumed you are shopping for some sort of loan. I don't know the particulars, but you can probably ask whoever you speak to at the banks about it.

We also wrote a letter that went along with our paperwork to the mortgage underwriter stating that each time our credit was run (since it was more than 14 days apart) was because we were shopping for the best mortgage, not incurring any new debt, and therefore it wasn't a problem.

Re: How do you shop for a mortgage without

megs is right, but I believe it's 30 days. I got this from a website:

Looking for a mortgage or an auto loan may cause multiple lenders to request your credit report, even though youre only looking for one loan. To compensate for this, the score ignores all mortgage and auto inquiries made in the 30 days prior to scoring. So if you find a loan within 30 days, the inquiries won’t affect your score while you’re rate shopping.

Re: How do you shop for a mortgage without

good info that I wanted to bump for other mortgage hunters

Re: How do you shop for a mortgage without

As a PP stated, if you're just shopping around, tell the bank what your credit scores are and ask them what kind of rates they can offer. You should only have them actually "pull" it (more than just once for a pre-app) after you are in contract and within 14 days. For a pre-approval - just get one from one bank and work on that. Once you actually have a contract, then give permission to pull to several different banks, within 14 day,s and it should only have the same effect as 1 pull.