You are a financial professional. Maybe you clean credit. Maybe you’re a loan officer. Maybe you’re an accountant, a lender, a renter. Hell you could be anything in the business world and have credit be somehow relevant. A great credit score is something everyone wants, but having credit that can at least get qualified is, in a lot of cases, what many people need. So if you are someone who is a broker selling tradelines, what are the big things you need to know in order to be able to sell tradelines effectively?
Do Tradelines Still Work?
You’re going to get this question a fair bit. People have access to information like they never have before, and if they put something into the Google search and read something online, many believe what they read is gospel, regardless of how true it is. And there are plenty of sites that say the FICO 08 model negates the effectiveness of adding tradelines–this is because the banks try to mitigate the tradeline business as much as they can.
But…as long as you get tradelines that post, you will see your clients’ reports benefit from them.
This isn’t to say there aren’t bad tradelines, but that’s where you come in. You are the expert. You are the one who’s gained your clients’ trust and know how to determine legit tradelines. But, again, if they post, and they have perfect payment history, are seasoned, and have decent limits, that’s the most important thing. But it gets more specific than that when a client asks you “what are the right tradelines to buy?” And your answer will depend on that particular client, because each client’s credit profile will decide the type of tradeline they need. So, if you know what type of line they need, the next most important thing is, do you need to do anything to get them to post?
Is There a Secret Method to Add Tradelines to Credit Report?
Hopefully without going too far into the weeds, yes, there is. When you get a tradeline for a customer, most of the time it will post automatically, but every once in a while it needs a little extra help. If you’ve got a client looking to buy personal trade lines, then he or she expects it to show up on at least 2 out of the 3 credit bureaus, and that is the most important thing, other than tradelines that report soon, as in ASAP (what most clients want).
What we are referring to here, is a Soft Pull, this is where you get a login to a site that merges the tradeline data with the credit reports.
In our experience, those sites are any experian-powered website (e.g. creditchecktotal.com, experian.com, and freecreditreport.com). There may be others, but we haven’t seen them yet.
If you’re getting tradelines to add to credit report and they don’t show on their own, then this is when you need to have the client get a login to one of these sites, change their address to the tradeline address, and order a 3-Bureau credit report. This will communicate to the credit bureaus there is data out there attached to this address and the line should post to 2/3 bureaus at that point.
Are There Other Easy Ways to Raise Your Credit Score?
This is the other question you’re likely to get from your clients. What other tricks are there? The best way to get a credit score improved is to make sure that everything gets paid on time. If you have clients that have accounts past due, then that is the number one priority. If they are looking at how to improve low credit score, then that is the thing that will help the quickest. The next quickest way to raise the score is to remove the negative accounts: collections, chargeoffs, etc. Once these are removed, the scores will rise, if there is positive data helping push the score up.
If there are no positive marks on the credit reports, this is where tradelines come in, and if you can get them to post, you will have happy customers.
