Why There’s a 10-15 Point Discrepancy in Your Prospect’s Credit Score

Please note that this post is an excerpt of the webinar hosted by our sister company, The Landlord Code, where our co-founders coach DIY landlords how to avoid problem tenants and maximize rental profitability. Get access to more training like this in our (free!) private Facebook group HERE.

Some creditors don’t report to the bureaus every month. So someone can say, “oh, I paid off that bill last week.” Well, it might not show up for a month. It depends on who they paid off. And if they paid off a creditor, that sometimes can take 90 days to report to the bureau. So you might say, “I paid this off,” but you’re better off showing proof that you paid it off to the prospective landlord instead of saying, “oh, it’s on my credit report and it’s off now,” but it’s not going to be off necessarily right away.  

One of the ways that this is relevant for landlords or agents who are looking at credit and trying to make sense of credit. And sometimes what we’ll see happen is we pull, with Equifax and the tenant will say, or the prospect will say, “that’s not my score. I pulled my own report.” So a couple of things could be going on here. One when an individual pulls their own score, it’s usually totally different. It is not the actual credit score that we are using or that someone like a lender would be using in the event of a bank. They’ll give you scores like 875, 925, those aren’t relevant. So that’s one way to understand if you and the tenant seemed to not be speaking the same language.

The other way is when you come down to these three different agencies, right? Sometimes maybe like he said, they may have paid off that visa debt, and it was reported faster to Equifax than it was to TransUnion or whatever. So there may be like a 10 to 15, 10 to 15 point swing in scores.