Why Your Client Is Paying for the Same Credit Report Three Times

By Jay Rodriguez, Chair, Hispanic Homeownership Council, Broker Action Coalition
June 4, 2026

Before I wrote this, I asked the mortgage professionals on the Hispanic Homeownership Council if they had a real client story about how repeat credit-report charges are affecting families during the mortgage process — not a hypothetical, not a statistic, an actual deal. One story stood out, and with her permission, I want to lead with it.

It comes from Isis Bravo at All In Lending in Riverside, California, who serves with me on the Council.

The Mireles family

Why $126 isn’t really $126

For the buyers NAHREP exists to serve, $126 is not a rounding error. It’s part of a tightly-managed cash-to-close stack. It’s the home inspection contingency. It’s the gap between a gift from family and what the underwriter actually requires. It might be a week of groceries, or the childcare cost while a parent runs to a closing appointment.

Multiply that across the broader market, and the picture gets sharper. A single tri-merge credit pull today can run $150 to $375, and those costs have climbed more than 400 percent over the last decade. The average mortgage shopper goes through that charge two, three, sometimes four times before they close. For a first-time Latino buyer in California or Texas, already managing earnest money, appraisal, gift funds, and DPA paperwork at the same time, every duplicate pull comes out of a part of the budget the family was counting on.

So the trade-off the current system is putting in front of our families is a strange one: shop your loan and protect your interests, or preserve the cash you’re going to need at the closing table. Those two things shouldn’t be in tension. That’s the piece we’re trying to fix.

What “portable credit” actually means

The Broker Action Coalition’s portable credit proposal is, essentially, the most boring fix you could imagine, and that’s kind of why I like it. It doesn’t require a new bureau, a new technology stack, or new pricing regulations for credit reporting agencies. It just lets the consumer do something they already do in tenant screening: pay for one verified report and share it.

The workflow is straightforward:

1. The borrower obtains a single verified credit report.
2. That report is assigned a secure reference number.
3. The borrower shares that reference number with whichever lenders they want to shop with, or with whichever loan officer ends up working their file.
4. Each lender pulls from the same verified report, no second charge, no duplicated data, no new hit.

One report. One reference number. Shared by the consumer, on the consumer’s timing. Make sense?

This is also what would have protected the Mireles family. If their original report had followed them when the loan officer changed companies, or when the file was restructured around the lost co-borrower, that $126 charge probably wouldn’t have happened at all.

The natural pushback I get from peers tends to be around data security. Fair question. The answer is built into the model: the borrower controls when the reference number is shared and who can use it. It’s not a credit file sitting in the wild. It’s a permission slip the consumer hands out, and can revoke. Theoretically, that’s actually more control than most borrowers have under the current system, where the moment they complete a 1003 on a lender’s site, they’ve kind of already lost the steering wheel.

Why this lands harder on the families we serve

The buyers most affected by repeat credit pulls are exactly the ones NAHREP’s mission is built around. First-time buyers without a parent or older sibling who’s already been through the process. Self-employed Latino business owners who need a non-QM option. Multi-generational households where decisions are made with abuelos, adult children, and a co-borrower spouse all in the same room, and where the answer is rarely a clean “yes” on the first call.

For the agents reading this in particular, every one of you has watched a deal go sideways for a reason the buyer didn’t cause. A loan officer changes shops. A co-borrower steps out. The file has to be restructured to make room for DPA, or a manual underwrite, or a guideline shift. The Mireles file isn’t an edge case. It’s a Tuesday. And right now, every one of those normal mortgage events is being quietly charged back to your buyer’s wallet.

There’s a second version of this same problem I see almost every week. A first-time buyer responds to an ad, a billboard, a call center, a friend’s recommendation, and gets pre-qualified by a lender whose product menu, just by design, is narrower than the buyer realizes. Maybe that shop doesn’t run FHA with a manual underwrite. Maybe they don’t touch bank-statement income for self-employed borrowers. Maybe they can’t layer down payment assistance on top of the structure that would actually make the deal work. The borrower gets told “no”, and they paid for that “no” with a credit pull. Then a NAHREP agent, a community partner, or a family member sends them to a broker who can actually structure the file, and they pay for the same data a second time, just to find out the answer probably should have been “yes” all along.

The current credit-pull system, in other words, isn’t neutral. It charges the borrower extra just to find the channel that was going to help them in the first place.

When a buyer has already been turned down once and has already paid a credit-pull fee, most of them, in my experience, don’t make the next call. They walk. We don’t see them. They don’t show up in the homeownership rate. They just quietly stop. If I were in their shoes, honestly, I’d probably do the same thing.

What you can do this week

There’s no bill on this yet. That’s the longer game, and BAC is working on it. Right now, the most useful thing our community can do is make this issue visible to the people who can actually change it. Personal stories from constituents, the kind every NAHREP Member has dozens of, are the single most effective advocacy tool we have. Capitol Hill staff aren’t pushing back on portable credit because they disagree. They’re not acting on it because nobody has told them it’s a problem.

• Sign the petition. Numbers move meetings. When BAC sits down with FHFA or a Congressional office, “thousands of industry professionals and consumers stand behind this” lands very differently than it does in a slide deck.
• Tell your story. Like Isis did. If you’ve watched a client lose a deal over repeat credit costs or watched the bill quietly grow because the file had to be restructured, share it. We use real stories in real meetings with real lawmakers.
• Share this. If you know a buyer, a partner agent, or a family member who’s been told “no” once and is wondering whether it’s worth calling anyone else, send it their way. The fix is simple. The hardest part is just letting more people know it’s on the table.