Beware Mortgage Refinance Downside: Trigger Leads
If you recently applied for a mortgage refinance your home, it may be only a few days before you get phone calls from other mortgage companies trying to sell you a home loan.How do other mortgage companies get your phone number?
If this happens, you are a likely victim of what is known in the industry as trigger leads. When you apply for a mortgage, a mortgage company pulls your credit report and checks your credit history.
That’s a normal part of the mortgage application and loan approval process.
But what many people don’t know, is that once your credit report has been pulled by a mortgage lender, it sets off a trigger that puts your name on lists that credit reporting agencies sell to other mortgage companies.
Telemarketers for those companies can get your name, phone number and other personal information and call you because they know you are in the market for a new home mortgage.
They typically offer too-good-to-be-true deals in hopes of getting you to switch to their home mortgage company. In some cases, they actually lie by claiming to have your home loan application and say they are just following up to get a little more information.
Now that the mortgage refinancing boom of 2003-04 is long over, many mortgage companies are desperately trying to find new and effective ways to keep their home loan volumes up.
This stiff competition has led some home mortgage companies to start buying trigger leads to try and drum up some business.
Apparently, by contacting a mortgage company and credit reporting agency, you are effectively giving these companies permission to offer you a mortgage loan, and thereby get around the do-not-call law.
Unfortunately, there is nothing you can do to stop credit reporting groups from selling trigger home mortgage leads, so you must focus on how to stop the calls.
You can opt-out of the mortgage trigger lists by going to this industry site at www.optoutprescreen.com, or by calling, toll-free, at 888-567-8688.
It may be ridiculous that you have to opt out of something to which you never opted into in the first place, but that’s the way the law works in this case.
Hopefully, if enough consumers complain about their personal data being sold as trigger leads, laws will be changed to prevent credit reporting agencies from selling them when people apply for home loans in the future.
SOURCE: Bellingham Herald