In HousingWire, Flávia Furlan Nunes described what originators have been feeling in their P&Ls: the math on credit reporting is breaking. Credit report prices have been rising sharply, and resellers are signaling as much as another 50 percent increase in 2026, which would mark the fourth straight year of higher costs.
That spike lands on top of an already expensive production base. Freddie Mac’s latest Cost to Originate study, reported by National Mortgage Professional, shows it now costs about $11,800 on average to produce a single retail mortgage. Lenders may be earning roughly $900 in pretax income per loan, but production expense keeps drifting higher. Digital underwriting tools like Loan Product Advisor can save an estimated $1,700 per file, yet some of that efficiency is being eaten up elsewhere, including in credit.
Credit reports have quietly moved from background expense to strategic decision point.
Two emerging models
In Nunes’s piece, you see two responses. At Oakmont Lending, broker Kevin Bell came from a world where branches pulled credit on almost everyone. At Oakmont, borrowers are often charged upfront instead of waiting until closing, and the company leans on application data and public records to coach clients on improving their credit before anyone spends money on a tri-merge report.
Atlantic Bay Mortgage has taken a different path. They still charge credit costs at closing to avoid friction at the start, but they begin with soft-pull reports and do not order a tri-merge until the borrower is further along, often under contract. The expensive hard pull is reserved for later, when the file has a better chance of closing.
Around those two approaches is a simple question every lender is being forced to answer: Is a credit report a cost of lead generation, or a cost of approval?
If you treat it as the former, you absorb fallout expense on every shopper who fills out a form and walks away. If you treat it as the latter, you have to build a different front end built on soft pulls, better application triage, and clearer consumer education on what a tri-merge really represents.
Credit as a readiness event
Soft-pull credit is becoming the gatekeeper between curiosity and commitment.
More brokers and lenders are experimenting with two-step structures: a limited-bureau look followed by a full tri-merge only when the borrower is more serious and more likely to close. Some are using a single-bureau report first and adding the second and third bureaus later in underwriting when there is more certainty.
There is consumer protection baked into this shift. In Nunes’s reporting, one broker noted that when a borrower shops three lenders, they can end up paying hundreds of dollars in credit fees before they are even approved. If the industry encourages rate shopping as good financial behavior, it is hard to defend a model that bills the consumer three times for the same underlying data.
That is why you are hearing more conversation about consumer-owned or reusable reports, and about pairing soft-pull credit with broader readiness tools that look at savings, debt habits, and budgeting alongside score.
Practical implications for lenders
As credit report prices climb, a few implications stand out.
Unnecessary tri-merges are no longer a rounding error. Every hard pull tied to a file that never closes is a direct hit to margin at a time when many lenders are already living close to breakeven.
Moving more early-journey work into soft-pull and financial-fitness environments allows originators to reserve tri-merge for the point of real application, not initial curiosity. That does not eliminate credit costs, but it makes them more predictable and more closely tied to actual revenue.
Borrowers are going to remember how they were treated. Charging upfront fees with no education or transparency will feel punitive. Explaining the economics, using lighter-touch tools first, and showing a clear path from “not ready yet” to “here is when it makes sense to order a full report” will feel like guidance.
The industry still needs tri-merge credit. What is changing is when and how often we get there. In a world where the cost to make a mortgage sits around $11,800 and one vendor category is talking about another large price jump, pulling credit cannot stay an automatic reflex.
It needs to be a strategy call.