Over the past few years, the cost of pulling mortgage credit has climbed steadily. Score royalties and bureau wholesale prices have both moved up, and for a busy desk those increases add up fast across a pipeline. For a lot of originators, report fees have gone from an afterthought to a line item worth actively managing.
You can't control what the bureaus charge. You can control how and when those costs hit your business. A few approaches that work:
Pull at the right moment. The most expensive report is the one you pull on a borrower who was never going to close. Tightening up when in the process a full tri-merge gets ordered, after a borrower has shown real intent rather than on every early inquiry, is the simplest lever most teams have.
Use a soft pull early. A soft-pull pre-qualification lets you assess a borrower without the cost or the hard inquiry of a full merge. It's a low-cost way to screen rate-shoppers and early-stage leads, so you reserve the full report for files that are actually moving.
Don't pay twice for the same file. When a report has an issue, ordering a brand-new tri-merge isn't always necessary. Targeted approaches like rescoring update specific items on the existing report instead, which can save you a second full pull.
Let the borrower carry the cost. One option more originators are turning to is having the borrower order and pay for their own report. On a CTI account, SmartPay does exactly that: you send a secure, personalized link, the borrower enters their information, authorizes the pull, and pays for the report at your exact cost, with no markup. Once it's paid, the completed report is ready to import into your LOS. It has a useful side effect, too: a borrower willing to pay for their own report is signaling they're serious, so it quietly doubles as a qualification filter on early-stage and internet leads.
None of these is the whole answer on its own, and the right mix depends on how your desk runs. The point is that rising report costs don't have to be something you simply absorb. If you'd like to talk through which approaches fit your pipeline, your Credit Technologies team is here to help.