The app score your buyer quoted you is worthless. Fannie Mae has you pull three older FICO versions and use the middle one, and nobody's phone shows those.
So before you order the tri-merge, have the buyer pull all three reports free at AnnualCreditReport.com and send you the PDFs. Ten minutes. Costs nothing. Here's what you get.
You see the bureau that's going to be the middle. Three files, three sets of balances, and one of them has the stray late or the duplicate account. That's your middle score, and now you know it before your vendor charges you.
You see the mismatch. A collection paid on one bureau and open on another. An address that isn't theirs. A hyphen a bureau couldn't hold. Those are the conditions your underwriter will write, and you can have the buyer working them while you're still pre-qualifying.
You save the pull. A buyer who's forty points under on one bureau doesn't need a hard inquiry today. They need thirty days and three letters. Send them here; they come back with a file you can explain.
I read two hundred files a week for eleven years. The deals that died on my desk were the ones where the loan officer found out which bureau was the problem on the same day I did.
Ask for the three PDFs. Every buyer, every time. It's the cheapest underwriting you'll ever do.
Sources
Every statutory citation in this article was checked against the source listed before publication. Nothing here is legal advice; if your situation has legal consequences, talk to a licensed attorney in your state.