The 3 in 1 Credit Report

When your mortgage lender or other creditor accesses your credit report, they get a “three in one” report. That means they are accessing information from all three of the major credit bureaus: Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion.

Why not just get a report from one credit bureau? Aren’t they all the same?

Yes, the three credit bureaus operate the same way, and if your lender has asked for FICO scores, they’ll all use the FICO scoring model to calculate your credit scores. But the reports your lender gets from them probably won’t be the same. In fact, they seldom are. That’s one reason why lenders want to see the 3 in 1 credit report.

In order to supply information to the credit bureaus, your creditor must be a paying customer of the credit bureau. Thus, some creditors choose to submit information to only one credit bureau rather than all three. Some creditors, such as electric utilities, are not required to submit information at all. Since reporting is expensive, some choose not to. 

Since the three bureaus do not share information, the personal and financial information on one report could be far different from the information on another report. When your lender obtains a three in one credit report, he or she gets a more complete picture of your financial history.
It is also important for consumers to periodically access their own 3 in 1 credit reports. Because up to 70 percent of all credit reports contain errors of some kind, seeing a 3 in 1 credit report gives consumers a far better chance of spotting an error that could be hurting their credit scores.