I don’t know a single person who owns a phone and hasn’t received a spam call. These calls typically come from an organization that obtained or purchased your contact information legally, from another organization that specializes in collecting that sort of stuff. Working in mortgage, I am all to familiar with the dreaded spam call. Here’s how it works:

I speak with a prospective homebuyer, let’s call him Mr. H. Now Mr. H is really eager to become a homeowner and wants to get preapproved within the next few days. He’s saved up some dough, worked on his credit, and has a great paying job. We go over all his questions and figure out that he’d likely qualify for a $300,000 purchase. He says, “that’s great! What are my next steps?” And I say “well, let’s get a preapproval application going and get you connected with a realtor so you can start seeing what’s out there for sale. Oh and by the way, have you opted out of receiving solicitations yet?” Mr. H did a lot of prep for our call today, but like him and everyone else I ask this question, he did not opt out. So when I pull his credit he is going to get spammed! But why is that?

There are mortgage salesmen not working at Sincere Mortgage Group, let’s call them bottom feeding scum, that purchase the contact information of people who submit a mortgage inquiry to any of the three credit bureuas–Equifax, Experian, and Trans Union. Yes, whenever your applying for a mortgage and authorizing a credit check, your personal information is submitted to the bureaus. Those bureaus sell your information to bottom feeding scum who then put your phone number and email address into a database and begin autodialing and auto-texting your number for mortgage services. The big problem? There’s lots of bottom feeding scum out there and they don’t take no for an answer.

So what can you do about it? There are a few things. First, go to www.optoutprescreen.com and complete the opt out form there. This takes about 5-7 days to go into effect and will significantly cut back on unwanted solicitations. Yes, I said it will cut back not cut out the calls. And that’s because not everyone gets the memo that you opted out. Those bottom feeding scum aren’t doing their due diligence and making sure the people they are soliciting to are not on the “do not call” list. The second thing you can do is submit a bogus phone number and email address on the preapproval application so all the soliciting calls/texts go to a different number than yours. Man, I’d be pissed if that was my number. But it can work if you are looking for a way to avoid the calls and texts. Why not just submit the inquiry without a phone number and text message? Well you could. But somehow someway the bottom feeding scum find your number sometimes. The third and final way to avoid spam calls is to ask for a soft credit check when submitting your preapproval application. What’s a soft credit check do you ask? Well, it’s like having your cake and eating it too. Some of the lenders we work with allow for us to issue preapprovals based on a soft credit check. These checks provide the exact same information as a hard credit check, except there’s no inquiry sent to the bureaus so there’s no “trigger” sent to the bottom feeding scum to call or text you. Sounds great, doesn’t it?

Truthfully, it is great. There are some catches though. Soft inquiries work for a preapproval and even the beginning stages of processing a mortgage application, but ultimately you will need to have a hard inquiry done before actually getting a mortgage application approved. But why Scottie? Well, I don’t know why exactly–other than saying the obvious–that you’re credit report is too soft (haha, I just made that one up). But seriously, it has to do with the actual reporting of the inquiry and the timestamp of your credit information as it pertains to an application. Soft inquires provide information but nothing more. Hard inquiries provide proof of one’s ability to qualify for a particular financing application. I know it sounds stupid but that’s because it is. The benefit of the third method is that it allows enough time for someone to opt out of solicitations and avoid most or potentially all spam calls while trying to buy a house.

It’s fun to read and write about this stuff. But if you’re thinking of homeownership one day–everybody that gets approved for a mortgage starts here.

Scottie Talaski

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