Having gone through this relatively recently, albeit not owning any resale first, purchasing direct for the first time in April(ish - more on that later) 2019 and adding on in August 2020, here's what we were told or came across as far as pulling credit, reporting, etc.:
They definitely do a hard pull on your credit the first time and that influences the interest rate, we were told. We weren't told anything about a minimum score. We actually had to have a second hard pull on our credit because we didn't actually sign our paper work until 4 months after we started everything and made our deposit (again, more on that later).
They DO NOT report to credit bureaus, so it doesn't appear on your credit. That can be a good thing for your credit rating because it doesn't increase your debt/credit usage. For the original poster, it would probably be better if they did report it since it would give them more credit history to boost the credit score since they are doing better financially than I am
. The not reporting actually turned out to be a pain for us because we refinanced our mortgage last year, and, being honest of course, reported all debt. Since it wasn't on our credit report though for the lender to be able to see, we had to jump through a bunch of hoops to get them a bunch of other information related to it (they actually need a copy of our signed note, which you don't normally get since the copies you get to keep are always unsigned - this is the case on mortgage settlements as well - so I had to get
DVC to mail me a copy of the signed note).
If you already have a loan with them and have 1 year of payment history or been a member for 1 year (can't remember specifically since ours is extra confusing), then they don't pull your credit for an additional loan for an add-on contract. We got just under the wire on this one.
Additionally, a second contract loan also has a lower interest rate (this may have also required that 1 year) by 1%. So, we only put 10% down on our first loan, but qualified for the best interest rate, which was 12%. If we'd put down 20%, the interest rate would have been 10%. For our second contract, we put down 20%, and our interest rate is 8.99%. If we'd only put 10% down, it would have been 10.99%.
The last point, which I alluded to above with our issues with taking so long to close/sign paperwork - just make sure you're not in the 1 or 2 states in which financing with them is a small issue. We live in Delaware and it was an issue for us. I think I guide said there was one other state he'd had the issue with - I want to say Colorado but don't quote me on that. DVC is not registered to finance loans (or something along those lines) in our state. They're registered I guess to sell timeshares, just not finance those sales. Because of this we could not complete the sale from home - they could not send us the contract and loan documents to sign and notarize here. However, anyone can purchase and finance if you are on location at WDW. Since we had a trip planned that August, they held our contract for us (and we got to keep the price per point since it was going up by over $20 per point) until we were going to be on property. Our guide had to get special permission and said it was the longest he knew of one being held. Since it was being held for a while like that, they technically had to re-write it just before signing, and since so much time had elapsed since they pulled our credit the first time, they had to get permission to pull it a second time. Not ideal for a credit score, but didn't really affect us. Just a little extra quirk to be aware of. The interesting thing is that we received our login and membership and points (member ID changed when they rewrote the contract) in April and we were able to actually book trips with those points months before actually signing our contract. What we booked was a couple months after signing, so I don't know if we would've broken the system if we booked something for prior to ever actually signing our contract.
