How many times can they run your credit

A lender may check your credit report once or twice. But checking your credit for 8 times is quite surprising! You should contact the lender as well as the credit bureaus and find out what you can do in order to remove those inquiries.

When financing a car thru a dealership, it is not uncommon for your credit to be run several times by different lenders. These are all permissable purpose as you probably gave permission on the financing paperwork. The finance department was trying to get you the best rates and the lenders need to pull your report to make an offer.

WOW!! What if you try to get a CC or a personalloan somewhere? Is it the same thing..your crdit will drop that much? Also..I've noticed, on some of my 'hard inquiries', that my credit was looked up by CA's.However....the debts are on my CR and the SOL has expired for my state (4 years) and they can't legally sue me. Why are the same CA's doing inquiries NOW??

This mostly happens with car dealers. They have access to so many lenders that they usually will run the credit several times (via different lenders) to get you the best deal (as Soap said). You'll find this with MOST dealerships but especially the ones who "guarantee" they can get you financed.

At what point do these hard pulls become 'poisoning' of your credit though? Eight times is excessive! I would call and ask them myself...especially if they do their own financing, as I can't see a reason to check lenders if that's the case.

Actually, I bought a truck myself today. Nowadays, there shouldnt be a dealer in the land that would need to run your credit that many times. They should be able to pull it once, look over the report themselves, and then they should be able to know where they can send you. Many dealers deal with several lenders--the one I went to was like this......they pulled my credit, looked it over, and then they knew which of their banks to send me to for the best rate and terms--because they deal with those lenders every day, they should have a good idea of who will take what kind of credit and who will not. I would DEFINITELY ask about this. Typically, if you have a few pulls within a short time frame all from the same kind of lender(all mortgage lenders, or all auto lenders), the CRA doesnt mess wiht your score because they can tell that you are shopping for a car/house/etc. But 8 by the same people is excessive and I would really ask about that. When we went to the dealer today, they pulled credit, looked it over, and then sent us to one lender who ended up doing the deal on terms we liked.

Lenders, especially nowadays, won't (and many times can't) take the dealer's word for it. The potential lender will also pull the report to verify the credit history.

So, the dealer's finance guy runs the report, then sends it to the top 10ish places you're most likely to get approved and those lenders can, and usually will, also run your credit.

That would be 11 hits.

We actually could use some clarification from the OP on this one. Did the dealership pull it 8 times, or were the pulls done by various lenders? If the same entity pulled it 8 times, there cannot be a legitimate reason for that.