Advantage Credit on your credit report: what this inquiry means

Who Advantage Credit is

Advantage Credit, Inc. sells credit reports, credit verification, fraud protection and rescoring tools to mortgage lenders. Rescoring is a lender-ordered update that gets a paid-down balance or a corrected error onto the report the lender is using. Its name on your report means a lender ordered your credit through Advantage Credit instead of going to the bureaus directly.

Is it a hard or soft inquiry?

A credit report ordered for a mortgage application is a hard inquiry. If you see a second entry from the same loan, ask the lender what it ordered that day.

Why it showed up on your report

A mortgage application, preapproval or refinance with a lender or broker that uses Advantage Credit as its credit vendor.

Why it can show more than once

A merged pull can leave one entry at each bureau. A later entry often lines up with a credit update before closing, since Fannie Mae requires credit documents to be no more than four months old on the note date.

How to check that you authorized it

1. Compare the date with your application and any closing date that moved.
2. Ask your loan officer whether Advantage Credit is the company's credit vendor.
3. Contact Advantage Credit's customer and consumer support line and ask which client ordered the report.

How to reach Advantage Credit

Use the support page on its consumer site to ask for a copy of the report a lender ordered through Advantage Credit. Its consumer credit page sends you to AnnualCreditReport.com for your current bureau files.

Guides that go deeper

• How mortgage preapproval shows up on your creditA mortgage preapproval usually means a hard pull from all three bureaus. Why one lender shows up three times, how shopping is scored, and what to avoid.
• Getting your credit mortgage-ready in 12 months, month by monthA month-by-month credit plan for the year before a mortgage: what to check, what to fix, what to leave alone, and the timing rules underwriters use.
• Removing hard inquiries you didn't authorize, the legitimate wayAn inquiry you never authorized can be disputed, and one from fraud can be blocked. One you did authorize can't. How to sort them and fix each kind.
• Hard vs. soft inquiries: which credit checks count against youA hard inquiry comes from a credit application and can trim your score. A soft one never does. A table of the common checks, gray zones included.