|
Special Reports
Credit Restoration
CreditCRM Pushing Creditors to Put Up or Shut Up
Providing leverage to the consumer
By James Comtois
With the subprime mortgage market in a state of crisis, Fannie Mae and Freddie
Mac's adoption of fixed-price loans and also Fannie and Freddie's price increases, a potential homebuyer's credit
score is becoming more and more crucial.
For potential homeowners with substandard Fair Isaac & Co. credit scores,
there are a few options at their disposal, such as credit counseling, debt settlement and authorized user systems.
However, methods such as credit counseling and debt settlement services can often cause damage to one's credit
score.
A company such as CreditCRM offers credit repair, which differs slightly from
these methods in that credit repair is designed to remove as many negative marks off a credit score as possible.
CreditCRM, a company created in 2006, offers its clients credit repair, which,
rather than negotiate a settlement or debt reduction on behalf of the client, challenges creditors and credit bureaus
to prove negative marks on a consumer's credit report, or otherwise remove them. "Sometimes the mere challenge
is enough. We try to clean somebody's credit up. We're in the business of getting negative marks removed. Increasing
credit score is main goal," said credit repair lawyer Edward Jamison, founder and chief executive of CreditCRM.
Given how hard markets worldwide have been hit by unprecedented loan performance
concerns, many market participants have been keeping a close eye on how credit has been evaluated in the loan-granting
process to see where concerns may have arisen. This has made the credit repair business one that requires careful
and up-to-date expertise. For example, so-called authorized user accounts' ability to affect FICO scores have come
under scrutiny and have been going through a reform process. "Credit repair has been around for a long time,
but with a perfect storm coming with the subprime crisis and fixed-price loans, a person's credit score is key.
It's getting serious," said Chip Dorman, vice president of marketing for CreditCRM.
If a creditor is reporting something that's devastating to a consumer, the consumer
is the one who needs to take action to prove it.
CreditCRM's credit repair service is designed to ultimately forces the creditor
to provide concrete proof of the negative report and often, when pushed, the creditor is unable to provide the
proper paperwork. "We only work on things that the client says is inaccurate. We'll have creditors prove the
accuracy of account to the degree the law says they have to and a lot of the times they cannot," Mr. Jamison
said.
According to Mr. Jamison, CreditCRM's credit repair methods are deployed to offer
leverage to the consumer and keep creditors in check. "Really bad credit can really ruin a person's life.
There needs to be checks and balances. Everything happens in favor of the creditors, so these checks and balances
need to be in play." "We're not going to hold [the borrower's] hand, but we can go in and get the credit
score where it should be," added Mr. Dorman.
Mr. Jamison points out that with credit repair, there is no guarantee that a consumer's
credit score can be fixed. "Anybody that says that there's a guarantee in credit repair is lying," he
said, adding that CreditCRM historically averages the removal of two out of three negative marks off a report.
"It's like a basketball game, you never know when the other team is going to play," Mr. Jamison said.
|
