Ask a room of buyers what credit score buys a house and you will get one confident number — and it will be wrong for half the loans in the room. There is no single score. Each loan program sets its own floor, each lender adds its own requirements on top, and the score the lender reads is not the score in your banking app. What there is: a short table of program floors, one pricing ladder above them, and a right way to find out where you actually stand. Here is the honest shape of it.
Start with the program, because the program sets the minimum. Conventional loans — the standard Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac route — typically require a score of 620. FHA loans are the forgiving floor: 580 qualifies for the 3.5% minimum down payment, and scores of 500 to 579 can still qualify with 10% down. VA loans set no official minimum score at all — the VA does not publish one — though most lenders look for roughly 580 to 620 in practice. USDA loans likewise publish no official minimum, with about 640 typically needed for the fastest automated approval. Jumbo loans, above the conforming limit, generally require 700 or higher. Then the lender’s own overlay sits on top: a program floor of 580 does not oblige a particular lender to lend at 580, and many require 20 to 40 points more. The floor tells you a loan exists; the lender tells you whether it exists for you.
Buyers arrive holding a number from a banking or credit-card app. Lenders do not use it. A mortgage application pulls scores from all three bureaus — Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion — scored on the mortgage industry’s FICO models, which are older and weigh mortgage-relevant history differently from the consumer models behind app scores. The three pulls rarely match, so lenders generally qualify a buyer on the middle score of the three, and a two-borrower file is generally keyed to the lower of the two middle scores. A buyer can watch an app score climb and still be read lower by a lender, or the reverse. The only score that prices a real loan is the one pulled for a real application — which is why the planning step is a conversation with a lender, not a screenshot.
Clearing the minimum and getting a good loan are different events. Lenders price rates in tiers: as the qualifying score rises, the rate offered falls, tier by tier, with the best conventional pricing generally starting around 740 and above. Under 20% down, the score also prices private mortgage insurance — the same loan costs more per month at 640 than at 740 before the rate itself is even compared. Compounded over a loan’s life, a tier or two is five figures of interest. So a score is not pass/fail; it is a price dial, and a buyer sitting just under a tier line should ask the lender a timing question — what would paying down a revolving balance or a few months of clean history do to the tier — before deciding whether to apply now or shortly.
Four moves, in order. Pick the program first — eligibility for VA or USDA, or an FHA floor, can matter more than twenty points of score. Get the lender’s pull when you are genuinely shopping, and ask which of the three scores the file was keyed to. Read the gap honestly: below a program floor, the work is credit repair measured in months — on-time payments, lower revolving balances, no new debts — and any service promising an overnight score is selling the one thing that does not exist. Protect the score you have between preapproval and closing: no new credit cards, no financed furniture, no unexplained large deposits, because the lender pulls again before the loan funds and buyers lose houses in that gap every year.
Homeowner HQ does not pull credit, score anyone, or decide who gets a loan — the lender’s pull and the program’s rules decide that, and any page or service claiming to know your mortgage score without a lender’s application is guessing. What HQ keeps straight is the other half of the file: the home itself. A loan is underwritten against a borrower and a property, and the property half — value, equity, the facts about the home — is the record your own agent keeps current for you here, so the number a lender appraises against is built on facts you have already corrected.
Your own agent sends a monthly value update from Homeowner HQ — the estimate, labeled as an estimate, with your equity beside it — and HQ runs on Amazon AWS. For a buyer, that equity line is the long game the credit score starts: the score prices the loan on day one, and the tracked value and shrinking balance are what the loan builds from there. When a purchase closes, file the settlement statement against the tracked record, and correct any fact about the home in HQ with your own agent the same week, so the home you track stays the home on paper.
Homeowners are always free. Realtors pay $25/mo to join and lenders join at the $5/mo founding rate, at any book size, with no setup fee; sending messages inside HQ is a $100/mo unlock ($125/mo total for realtors, $105/mo total for lenders). A lender-sponsored realtor joins for $0.
Homeowner HQ is an AI-powered marketing department for agents and lenders — a relationship and revenue engine, not a homeowner database. A homeowner's record routes them back to their own agent; it is never sold and never shown to lenders.