Hard pulls, soft pulls, and what your buyer can actually dispute

A hard inquiry the buyer authorized is not disputable, and one they didn't is the only one worth a letter. Everything else in the inquiry section is a month of postage for fewer than five points.

Your buyer has seen the video. It says every inquiry without an account has to come off, and they want thirty days to clean the section before you pull. Give them these four things instead.

Soft pulls don't count. Their own checks, your pre-qual soft pull, the card company's account review, the prescreen offers. Not scored, not seen by the underwriter as applications.

Hard pulls count for twelve months and fade fast. FICO scores them for a year, ignores mortgage, auto and student pulls from the last thirty days, and treats a cluster of the same type inside 45 days (14 on older models) as one. Two years and they're gone. The dealer that shopped them to nine lenders last winter is one inquiry to the score and zero by next winter.

The one real dispute is "I never applied." A company they have no relationship with, no application, no authorization. That's a permissible-purpose problem under § 1681b, and it comes off. Two lines, certified, done.

Everything else stays, and should. A denied application is still a lawful pull. "It didn't turn into an account" is not a ground for anything, and a bureau that gets that letter marks it frivolous and moves on.

My mother's red pen went through the inquiry section of a report exactly once. She didn't circle anything.

What the section tells you, as the loan officer, is worth more than what it tells the score: a cluster of card applications in the last ninety days is new-account risk you'll be asked about; twelve auto pulls in three days is one dealer visit; a hard pull from a lender the buyer can't name is the mixed-file flag, and that one goes in the letter. Read it for that.

Then send them to Calvin's piece, which has the statute and the score math, so the thirty days go to the collection with the wrong balance instead.

The buyer who wants to dispute inquiries usually has a wrong field on an account they haven't looked at yet. Eight files, the inquiry section marked authorized or not, and letters only where a letter can work: the referral takes twelve minutes.