Overview
Great Lakes Credit Repair is based in West Michigan and helps consumers improve their credit situation. They focus on using disputes to remove harmful and inaccurate information from their client’s credit reports, earning them a score boost and making their financial situation a bit better.
Pros
The first advantage they have is they have a process to help get rid of negative or harmful information on consumer’s credit reports. This gives their FICO score an immediate boost, and helps them get better options on loans and credit. The company will dispute information on the credit report. The law means that the burden falls on the credit reporting agency to say that the information is 100% accurate. If the credit reporting firm can’t prove the item or items are 100% accurate, then they have to remove it from the report.
Cons
The company isn’t perfect. The first issue we have is they use a monthly fee model instead of a pay-per-deletion model. We don’t like this model as much because it means that the consumer is paying the credit repair firm to wait for a response from the reporting agency. Neither the consumer nor the credit repair company has control over how long the credit reporting agency takes to respond to a dispute or verification request, and so the cost for credit repair services can become higher than it should be with the monthly fee model.
They also have some other issues, including the fact that their prices and fees are on the higher side for the credit repair companies we reviewed. This brings them down a few notches because it limits the number and type of consumers that can get value from their services. Moreover, higher prices don’t correspond to better results or higher customer satisfaction in our research, so there isn’t as much of an upside as consumers might hope.
Verdict
Great Lakes Credit Repair charge more than we think consumers should be paying for credit repair services. We don’t like the monthly payment model, and they don’t do enough to justify the higher cost of their services.
