Know which lenders will buy the deal before you submit it

Most declines on a workable deal are not about the customer. They are about the structure landing at the wrong desk. A 2016 Malibu with 20,000 miles, a thousand dollars of negative equity on the trade and $500 down is a fine deal at a lender that allows 115% of book on a nine year old car. Send it to a bank that caps model year 2017 and older at 100% and you get a callback asking for $1,100 more down, if you get a callback at all.

The F&I manager usually knows this. The problem is that fifteen rate sheets change every month and nobody can hold all of them in their head while a customer waits in the chair. So the deal goes to the two or three lenders that bought the last one, look to book drifts, and the rate the customer gets is whatever came back first.

There is no shared lender database behind FirstLook. Each dealership uploads its own lender PDFs, the ones that arrive by email every month, and FirstLook reads them into a library you can see and correct. When a new sheet comes in, it shows you the fields that changed, with the page they came from, and waits for you to approve them before they are used.

If a sheet is silent on something, say the minimum income for a tier, FirstLook leaves that field marked as not on the sheet. It never fills a gap with a guess.

FirstLook is not a lender and does not make or communicate a credit decision. It compares a deal to the written program rules your lenders already sent you. Race, color, religion, national origin, sex, marital status, age (other than capacity to contract) and receipt of public assistance never enter the comparison, and the reasoning behind every ranking is logged so you can show it.