Hi Hackrs,
I am in the market for a new car and was wondering at what point do dealerships pull your credit scores.
If I am shopping around at the local Audi dealers, am I able to negotiate the discount from MSRP and find out the MF, RV, and incentives each might offer (as well as their fees DAS) without having my credit pulled first?
Thanks for your input.
Yes you can get all of that information without running your credit.
Edmunds forums are a great resource for things like MF, RV, and discount averages people are seeing in your particular area.
DO NOT let any dealer run your credit until you have the deal you want. the last thing you do in the leasing or financing is run your credit, because the more you run it the more goes down.
Credit reports cost the dealer money, so in general they have a disincentive to pull if they don’t think you’re going to drive away with a car.
Some will pull your credit earlier in the process than necessary because you’ll start to feel committed to leaving with a deal.
But the last thing you should worry about is multiple inquiries from car shopping. You could have 500 inquiries for auto financing within a 30-day period and FICO still only scores that as one.
https://www.myfico.com/credit-education/credit-reports/credit-checks-and-inquiries
You will often not notice a score change after the first inquiry either, because inquiries are virtually meaningless.
So even if I shop around and get inquiries from Audi, MB, BMW, etc they will just combine into one inquiry as long as they all happened within 30 days?
yes but if you just do one hard pull you will know where you stand. Why do multiple? Besides that, I think a dealer will be less willing to negotiate if they have already pulled your credit. It’s the equivalent of walking onto the lot. They will think they have the upper hand. Just my opinion. I only let them pull my credit after everything has been agreed to and I’m ready to sign (that’s when I head over to meet in person)
They aren’t really combined (in the sense that the additional ones don’t “disappear.”)
You can still see them on your reports, but the FICO scoring algorithm doesn’t care if there are 500 or 17 or 1 from car shopping within the previous 30 days.
I agree that once you let someone pull your credit you’ve flashed the first sign that you’re starting to give in.
One of the benefits of maintaining perfect credit is always knowing where you stand, even without the dealer’s credit pull. 
That’s true to a point. Honestly though if you’re deep into Tier 1 (800 FICO’s+) inquiries aren’t that big of an issue.
While a true blue hacker im also somewhat of a CC Churner and despite it being harder to do now with all the stipulations there were times when my experian report was showing north of 30 hard inquiries inside the 24mo window (everyone pulls experian in Texas!!!)
Inquiries over one year old are completely ignored by FICO.
I don’t remember the exact metric, but there is also a maximum number of inquiries that FICO algorithms will even consider (I think it’s five, after that, you could have 1,100 in the past 12 months and it wouldn’t make a difference to your score.).
I wish they would stop that nonsense already. Any pull against your credit always knocks your score down. Pretty unfair when an individual has a perfect score, pays all their bills on time, doesn’t carry much debt and every soft pull knocks a dozen or so points off their credit history…
I had tier one credit and after my lease my credit card company jacked up my APR to 25%, never missed a payment in my life with them and more than 75% of the time the card is paid off at the end of the month. Not cool with me.
You are misinformed.
Soft pulls aren’t factored into your FICO scores at all, and lenders do not even see them.
Hard pulls barely impact your credit, if at all.
If every inquiry knocked 12 points off my score, my FICO 8 would currently be 921 (I have seven hard inquiries on Experian).
This scale only goes up to 850.