Trouble with seeing consistent credit account information across the main CRAs

Radge70

I am currently making a big push to get my credit file in as good an order as possible before applying for a mortgage towards the end of the year. As such, I have joined practically every credit rating agency there is (Experian and Equifax free trials, Noddle, Martins Credit Club and Clear Score).

I am now fairly familiar with how it all works and how the “credit score” that each of these services provide is really just a guide etc etc and that even the services that use data from the same source (e.g. Experian free trail and Martins Credit Club) will come up with different scores as well as variations on what credit accounts you have.

There’s a couple of things I want to confirm (just to make sure), the first being my belief that these services are really just portals that show a snapshot of your “actual” file and are dependent on being fed accurate information by the user, mainly in regard to address history. E.g. if you haven’t entered in your full address history then they tend not to show any financial information for the addresses you have missed out. In real life, however, any company doing a hard search on you will pick up ALL financial information (I assume because they have requested the full history from you and also because they have more thorough methods of linking you to all of your previous addresses). They will also see that you are on the Electoral role even if the credit rating portal claims you are not (in my case because there is a variation in the address format used by the Royal Mail database and the Electoral Register). Is this correct?

It took me a while to work all of this out and I was panicking a bit that some of the services didn’t give you the ability to add your full address history and some don’t have it in the correct order. I assume now, though, that all that matters is that the addresses are all there, irrespective of their order or how they came to be there (e.g. whether you entered the info yourself or if the system was clever enough to add the address for you as it knows you have a link). Is this correct too?

Given I have signed up for so many services, I am able to use them all in conjunction with each other in order to check every financial account I have, which is fine. For those services that have some of the info missing though, it would be nice to be able to see it just so I can be sure there are no discrepancies, but also to ensure the accuracy of the imaginary credit score they work out for you (purely for fun of course!).

In the case of Equifax (paid service), you are only allowed to add 3 addresses in total – current address and 2 previous. In my case I have a total of 4 addresses picking up open and closed credit accounts over the past 6 years. Equifax picks up the credit account info on 2 of the 3 addresses it allowed me to add (the 3rd has no credit accounts attached to it anyway) and also on 1 of the others, which is states is “linked”. This means it’s not reporting at all on one of my addresses (the one that happens to have an account with a default on it!). In order to see the info on this address am I best just to ask them to delete the one that has no info anyway and get them to add the one that does? Or does this wreck things in some other way?

I would ask Equifax all of this but they are utterly useless, as are Experian! Therefore your advice is appreciated in advance……..