Complaint Review: LendingTree - Internet

In response to your comment that you were pre-qualified with 8 different lenders, that is not true. LendingTree matches you with up to 5 lenders, and 5 lenders ONLY. The reason the lenders requested additional information and then turned you down is because the offers are not based on a full and complete analysis of your credit report. They are computer generated based on the information provided within the form. You are "pre-qualified" because the information you provided (i.e. your credit score ((which IS a soft credit pull by LendingTree)), your income, loan amount, LTV, debt-to-income ratio, etc...) qualified for specific programs specific lenders have. If you read the privacy policy, security statements and terms of use then you would see on there that all the offers your recieve are subject to terms and conditions stated by the lenders. Your credit score did not drop 22 points. Did you know that you score can be 20+ points higher when YOU pull your own report than when lenders do? I have gone through LendingTree numerous times, and was matched with the maximum of lenders each time...and my credit did not suffer such a hit as you make claims of. Now...the "shop around period" stated on www.myfico.com does not apply to credit cards or personal loans. So that is something you have to suck up, regardless of where you go. Lendingtree does not sell your information. Each lender pays a nice fee to be a part of the LendingTree network to recieve leads. This is what is advertised...and this is what they do. There is no false advertising, or misleading factors. Everything is cut and dry if you just read the fine print. Who would ever think to put their social security number on a website without thoroughly reviewing the terms of use and disclosures! That's INSANE! And then you want to complain because you didn't read the fine print. Shame on you.

My situation was similar, so here goes: I'm looking to buy a home. I go to lendingtree and fill out a request. They ask for some general information such as employer, salary, residence, debt, loan amount and type of loan you want. Less than 24 hrs later I get a response saying I "PRE QUALIFIED" with 8 different lenders. Great! Right? NO! About a week later I am informed by "MyFICO Scorewatch" that my FICO score dropped 22 points...I look at the details and find out that the reason for the 22 point drop was a recent inquiry from CREDCO (they supply lendingtree with your credit report). Now that the damage is done to my score, I might as well work with lendingtree to get my loan. I contacted the representative and he requested more info from me. They needed 2 years woth of W2s, my last 2 paystubs, and my last bank statement. I faxed it all over to them and waited for a decision. Next day I got one: They said that because of a few collections listed on my report (total $4500) that I ca CANNOT be approved for ANY loan amount. They said the shopped it to 150 different lenders and not a single one would approve me for a loan. I don't understand! Why did they say I was "pre qualified"???? well.... Here's the deal: In order to "pre qualify" with lendingtree, all you need to do is give some basic info and then "HIT THE SUBMIT BUTTON". NO, I'm not exagerating...I put it to a test: I logged into my lendingtree account and submitted a new request using all my previous information, but this time I requested a loan in the amount of $2,000,000 (yes, two million dollars) and guess what...I was "pre qualified"!!!! AMAZING, I was "pre qualified" on a $2 million dollar, zero down loan...all on a $55,000 per year salary. Now here is what is truely amazing...I talked with a couple of local "real" morgage brokers and here is what I got from them: Broker 1 told me that, based on my salary and employment alone, they will "PRE APPROVE" me for a $300,000 zero down loan. Broker 2 told me, after pulling my credit report, that they can "PRE APPROVE" me for a $400,000 zero down loan. Of course this flies in the face of lendingtree's "we can't approve you for any amount with any lender" statement. So, in the end it all came down to this: Lendingtree did nothing for me other than: 1) waste 2 days of my time (the home I wanted is no longer on the market...and I had spent several months looking before finally finding the RIGHT one) 2) damage my credit score by 22 points (this would be the equivalent to having a tax lien and 2 collection accounts added to your report) 3) put me on some kind of call list (since my application with lendingtree, i am getting all kinds of BS calls, even though I was and m registered on the "do not call list" BTW...when I asked the rep at lendingtree about pulling my credit report and the damage it did to my score...he said "your score did not drop 22 points" and "we do a soft pull". MY a*s! He was kind enough to send me a copy of the report he had (a 3-in-1 version provided by CREDCO) and of course it is a highly detailed full report also known as a "HARD PULL". Lendingtree surely made a few hundred dollars on selling my information to every tom, d**k, and harry. All I can say is F##K LendingTree.

I really have to rebut this being in the industry as long as I have. First, Lending Tree does not actually lend you the money...they find banks to let you go to for applications and THEY pull your credit. Now, as far as points go, most peolpe have this entirely wrong and it's serious mythology that is just baseless. When you go to a store and apply for their credit cards...YES your score will drop an average of 5 points for each application. This is because they are not a bank and the bureaus figure you are extending further credit and making a bigger possibility of default. With a bank, the major credit bureaus understand that you are shopping for a loan to rearrange what you already have in most cases. When you pull credit with a bank, pulls within a 14 day period are grouped together as one. You should only see maybe (MAYBE) a 5 point hit for those done within that period if they are less than 10 inquiries. You don't get dinged for each pull. I have had customers SWEAR this was the case, and when I pulled it, it was exactly the same, and in some cases higher. Car lenders again count individually and visiting several dealers can really screw you. Now...there may be other factors that drop your score that quickly. Charging anything on your credit cards can make it go down. Paying something off can theoretically make it go down, or closing old accounts can make it go down. Being late a day can drop it seriously. Any number of things like this can cause it to drop 30 points. Percent of outstanding balance against your limit is a serious influence. Being 20% of limit is usually ok...80% of limit will drop you seriously, and over-limit will crush you by 100 points easy. When that 100 points is assigned could be 1 or 5 days after charging...or more. That's rather arbitrary...so you may be a victim more of bad timing. Some nasty brokers will shop you all over and a broker pull may be different than a bank (direct lender) pull. Brokers with cross license as a bank will be that "soft" pull grouped in, but possibly not a true broker that does not fund their own loans. Hard to tell, but that's popular thought. Whoever told you this at Lending Tree must be new to the business. Read up on it...they are not correct. Literally, you can pull the same credit 2 different days and you will get 2 different scores. Also (and I got this directly from the credit bureaus through researching it myself) when you pull your own credit score online with one of those services or even directly, you may be seeing a score that is actually HIGHER than you will get when you pull it through a lender. I went quite high up in management levels to get to the bottom of this when it happened several times to borrowers of mine. What did I find out? I found out that even high up management could not explain this, but did admit that MOST times the score you see when you do your own pull is higher than it really is...sometimes significantly so (I've seen it as much as 60-80 points different) because (and I'm quoting them here) "the individual's score in these cases is based upon somewhat differing criteria than a lender uses and will overlook some specifics that will affect the real score." That's coming from INSIDE the bureaus...by management...more than one manager too!!!! I even had someone within our own company investigate this and they still got the same runaround from the credit bureaus and vague answer. It went pretty high up with our management contacting them since we are using them to base our loans upon their scoring. That is also where I confirmed the bureaus saying they group pulls from lending institutions (mortgage banks specifically). So...for you to say you dropped 30 points because of Lending Tree is flat out incorrect. It more likely was just a fluke coincidence or something you did aside from that. Again, Lending Tree is not the bank. They just find one for you.