soft search and hard search???

Vikaroo

Hi, my partner and I were declined for a mortgage with natwest last week and are in the process of applying again. There is no obvious reason as to whybas we passed affordibility checks etc. We are now applying through halifax. Obviously Im nervous now having already been declined for one. The mortgage advisor at Halifax says we have passed the soft credit search and told us that the soft and hard searches are the same with the only difference being that one shows on your credit file and the other doesnt. He also says that if we have passed the soft search then there is no reason we shouldnt pass the hard search and the application should be accepted unless anything changes now inbetween, but Im not convinced. What I want to know is; is this true? We get our answer on Monday.

Thanks

Tixy

With a mortgage the initial search may be with just one credit reference agency and the hard search be a search of all 3 agency files.

Have you checked all 3 credit ref agency reports?

Obviously the other option would be if something on your credit files had changed between the soft search and when the hard search was done.

jamesd

There are two most common ways that credit searches happen, soft/quotation searches and hard/application searches. There can also be money laundering searches and a few other types that don't matter for this discussion.

A place doesn't have to use quotation searches but if they do, those are not shown to other potential lenders. They are shown to you if you ask for a copy of your credit report.

A soft search tells the company asking for the search the same things that the credit reference agency would have reported for a hard search so if they say yes after a soft search there's no reason for the information in that credit record to change any automated decisions later in the application. However, sometimes a human looks later on and the human may see something that the computer didn't notice, so occasionally it does happen that something in the credit record is OK at soft search time but then causes a decline later on.

Beyond that, a lender might just check more credit reference agencies once the application goes ahead and sometimes there are differences in the information at the different agencies that can make a difference.

So the broker was pretty much accurate, aside from the chance of a human seeing something or another credit report having some different information.