By Living Room Realty, May 17, 2018
Right now (late Spring of 2018) I really have been enjoying working with buyers. Unlike the last few years, there is actually some inventory to look at, bidding wars are cooling off and you can find a great house at a fair price. In my initial phone meeting with Tiffany & Ryan I must have come off as adamant that they get pre-approved before we get too far into the home buying process. One of them asked me “why?”. I quickly came up with my top 3 bullet points:
- Knowing your specific borrowing power make the shopping process much more efficient.
- The application process can illuminate issues that we need to be out in front of. Things such as: credit score problems, student or car loan expenses that need to be dealt with, sourcing of down payment funds and employment roadblocks just to name a few.
- And you never know, you just might find that perfect house on the first day out. This one rarely happens though.
After they got pre-approved, I met Tiffany & Ryan to tour some homes on a Spring weekend. The first 5 homes we looked at were kind of okay, but disappointing if we were being honest. The last home was in a sweet neighborhood that they knew well (because they had friends who lived nearby). After a half hour in the house we were standing at the curb talking about an offer; a surprise for us all! It was the perfect starter home: move-in-ready, but still plenty of room for improvement and in an established neighborhood. Offer accepted, inspections in the books and sale closed!
The moral of the story is: always get pre-approved because you never know when you might find that gem and you don’t want to spend the rest of your home search chasing it!
