Behind your back -- and probably without the knowledge or consent of your mortgage loan officer -- the national credit bureaus have begun hawking your personal financial details within 24 hours of your making a loan application, a rate inquiry or a request for a mortgage preapproval letter.

They are selling what they call "trigger" lists of people who just contacted a mortgage lender and gave permission for the loan officer to check their credit.

Who's buying the information? Little-known marketing data intermediaries who resell the fresh leads to competing lenders who want to know your name, credit and financial details and your phone number and address so that they can hit you with their own offers.

Companies like Mortgage Inquiry Data, Inc., of Coral Springs, Florida, boast that they can provide "access to everyone in your city who applied for a mortgage loan within the past 24 hours. You can contact these people the next day and offer them a preapproval for a better loan with your company."

A competing marketer, Intellidyn Corp. of Hingham, Mass., offers what it calls its "IntelliAlert" program. "Imagine the value of knowing what prospects have inquired or submitted an application with your competition" within hours. Intellidyn's hot leads don't come cheap: For "platinum" level clients, who agree to buy at least $31,395 worth of overnight trigger alerts every month, Intellidyn promises to keep them informed of any mortgage inquiry or application anytime, in any designated area in the U.S.

Home mortgage lenders themselves are angry about the new hot leads programs. Dan Hughes, a loan officer for Summit Mortgage Corp. in Edina, Minn., told Realty Times that "as a traditional loan officer who gets most of my business from referrals from Realtors and past customers, I take a dim view of anyone who buys leads from any source" -- but worst of all from "overnight" data purveyors "who are feeding off my own clients' personal information."

Pat Barney, another Summit Mortgage loan officer, recalls recently applying for a home equity credit line from a large New York-based bank. Within a day or two, he got a call from a competing lender trying to persuade him to cancel his application with the New York bank and switch to her company. A day later, he got another call, this time from a lender who claimed that "I've been notified by your lender that you're looking for a home equity line."

Barney knew that could not be true. After all, "why would (the New York bank) want to let anyone else know about my application?"

What sort of personal data is being siphoned out of applications and repackaged and sold by the credit bureaus? It gets pretty scary: According to Mortgage Inquiry Data, hot leads include individuals' credit scores, open mortgage balances, current monthly mortgage payments, loan-to value ratios of their homes, revolving debt balances and other personal data.

Ginny Ferguson, a California mortgage broker and a credit expert for the National Association of Mortgage Brokers, asks "where is the line here? When do you begin to violate individuals' privacy rights?" She said her group plans to investigate the overnight sale of fresh mortgage application data for possible violations of the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

Ferguson and other lenders are especially galled by the fact that the credit bureaus are marketing confidential information that lenders or brokers often pay for themselves -- credit inquiries by potential loan applicants. Then they are turning around and selling it to direct competitors of the lenders who made the credit inquiries in the first place.

For their part, two of the national credit bureaus -- Equifax and Experian -- confirmed that they sell overnight "trigger" lists. TransUnion did not comment. But Equifax and Experian spokesmen said their list sales violate no laws, and are simply speedier versions of their traditional "preapproved credit" lists they routinely sell to lenders.

If you object to such hawking and 24-hour distribution of your private financial data, you currently have no "opt-out" rights. But some state consumer protection agencies say they are looking into the issue, and you can express your concerns to them or to the Federal Trade Commission, which oversees the credit industry.

Published: March 13, 2006

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Kenneth R. Harney writes an award-winning, nationally-syndicated column on housing and real estate from Washington, D.C. He is also managing director of the National Real Estate Development Center, a professional education company. He is a past member of the Federal Reserve Board's Consumer Advisory Council, a committee that by federal statute reviews all Fed actions on home mortgage, consmer credit and banking industry regulation. He served as a member of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's Working Group on Computerized Loan Origination (CLO) systems, and is a member of the Editorial Board of the Fannie Mae Foundation's journal, Housing Policy Debate. He is the author of two books on mortgage finance and real estate.