Offense Doesn’t Need to be Offensive

Pulling credit. For numerous reasons, when I’m in the middle of taking a mortgage application, and I ask the borrower for her/his social security number, I often get these responses:

“Do you really need to pull my credit?”

“Can we wait to pull my credit until . . . ?”

“I’m not comfortable giving that to you.”

They don’t flinch when I ask them how much money they make or what they have in the way of monthly debts, but when I ask for their social, you’d think I was asking for intimate measurements or nuclear launch codes.  They forget that they came to me (I wasn’t standing on the street corner soliciting) in search of the amount for which they can qualify.

In today’s environment, though, many of us as agents and originators are actively soliciting people’s business – we’re not just waiting for our phones to ring or our inboxes to fill.  Because of this go-on-the-offense behavior, we want to be very careful that we’re not being lumped in with Zillow and other marketing monsters who are just looking to grow a database that can be sold or leveraged.

To that end, we’ve come up with a new way to help pulling credit scores without buyers having to share their social security number OR their birth date.  Additionally, it’s a soft pull, which means it has NO EFFECT on their current scores.  When you as an agent come across a buyer who is reluctant to have her/his credit pulled, sometimes you’re sitting precariously on the horns of a dilemma because you don’t want to show them houses until they know what they’re qualified to purchase, but you don’t want to let them go and get scooped up by another agent.  Because of that, we give you this service to keep in your back pocket and keep them in your sphere.

This is the essence of 21^st-century customer service: protecting your clients’ privacy while providing you with value.  Give us a call so we can show you how this is done – you’ll be glad you did.