Most people meet Informative Research in one of two places: as an unfamiliar hard inquiry during a mortgage application, or in the fine print of a denial letter naming the company that supplied the credit report. Either way, the question is the same — who is this, and why do they have my credit file?
What Informative Research is
Informative Research is a credit reporting company that serves mortgage lenders. Its own borrower resources page describes the company as one that gathers credit-related information from the bureaus and provides reports to lenders evaluating loan applications, and puts it plainly: it does not make lending decisions — it provides the data that helps lenders do their job. It appears on Fannie Mae’s list of approved credit information providers — the companies mortgage lenders order reports through when they run an application. It gathers your information from Equifax, Experian and TransUnion, assembles it into the report your lender ordered, and delivers it.
Why Informative Research is on your credit report
When a lender orders your credit through Informative Research, the pull is recorded on your bureau files under the company’s name, sometimes alongside the lender’s. That is why a mortgage application with a lender you recognize can produce an inquiry from a company you have never heard of. If you applied for a mortgage recently, the inquiry is usually that application. If you have not applied for anything, an inquiry you do not recognize is worth taking seriously — it can be a sign of a mixed file or identity theft, and you have the right to know who pulled your file and why.
The report your lender saw is not the report you see
The report Informative Research assembles for a lender is not identical to the file you pull from the bureaus, and mortgage lenders score with different models than consumer apps use — which is why the score your loan officer reads you can differ sharply from the one on your phone. That gap matters when something goes wrong: an account that is not yours, a paid-off debt still showing a balance, or another person’s record merged into your file can sit in the lender’s version and cost you an approval you should have had.
How to dispute an error on an Informative Research report
The company’s borrower resources page directs disputes to consumerdisputes@informativeresearch.com, to 800-473-4633 between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. Pacific, Monday through Friday, or by mail to Informative Research, C/O Disputes, P.O. Box 2379, Garden Grove, CA 92842 — and states that disputes are reviewed within five business days, with errors that originated in its own system corrected within twenty days and bureau-originated errors forwarded to the bureaus. Because the company assembles bureau data, a complete dispute goes to the source bureau as well. Companies that assemble and resell credit reports are consumer reporting agencies under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, with their own accuracy and dispute-handling duties — a dispute they ignore or a report they will not correct is not a dead end.
When a report error costs you the mortgage
If an inaccurate report cost you a loan approval or a better rate, that denial letter is evidence. The FCRA lets consumers recover actual damages, and in the right case statutory and punitive damages, from the companies responsible for inaccurate reporting. The deadlines run from discovery, so a denial letter naming Informative Research is a document to keep. Our page on suing a mortgage company for an FCRA violation covers how these cases work, and if another person’s information is in your file, start with mixed credit files.
What it costs
The FCRA is a fee-shifting statute: when a consumer wins, the company pays the attorney’s fees. You pay nothing unless we win.
Where your situation fits
Informative Research is one of a small group of companies that pull and merge credit reports for mortgage lenders — the same family as Factual Data, Credco and Xactus. If the name on your report or denial letter is one of these, the analysis is the same: get the report, find the error, and hold both the reseller and the source bureau to the statute. Our FCRA attorney page covers how these cases work.
We represent consumers against the bureaus, the specialty and mortgage reporting companies, and the companies that furnish information to them. Send us the denial letter or the report and we will tell you whether we see a claim. Contact The Kim Law Firm for a no-cost review.
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Published by The Kim Law Firm, LLC — about attorney Richard Kim. Last updated August 2026.