Get Pre-Qualified

Mortgage pre-qualification is a quick overview of your creditworthiness to give you and your Real Estate Professional a baseline for how much home you can afford. There is nothing worse than going out to look at homes and falling in love with a price point or home that your budget will not allow you to afford. By getting Pre-qualified upfront we help to eliminate this and it lets us know upfront if you meet the minimum requirements to purchase a home. Pre-qualification is one of the most important steps when buying a home because it allows you to see a picture of your finances and lets you know if buying a home now is the right decision for you. If you are a person who is sure of your finances and pay close attention to your budget and credit score on the regular bases then you may want to go ahead and get preapproved with your lending institution or one suggested by your Real Estate Agent or Broker.

Getting approved first will help you with the following:

1. It helps you to understand your purchasing power.
2. It allows you to know if there are potential credit issues that can delay your process up front. This allows the lender and your agent to help devise a plan to get you approved quickly if something is found on the report.
3. It allows you to Move quickly when your find a home you love
4. This helps to establish a baseline so that you can compute taxes and insurance and stay within a comfortable budget for you

To get prequalified, the lender will conduct a simple phone interview with you and gather some basic information. You will need to give permission for your credit file to be pulled, your debt to income ratio will be looked at. You will also need to tell the lender about your income and finances; having your last 2 months pay stubs and tax returns for the last 2 years handy is great! If you have assets tell the lender about these, this makes your file look even better. “Tell” your lender everything up front so we don’t run into any problems once we find your home.

1. There are different loan types and each has a different Debt to Income (DTI) requirements. For example, Veteran Assistance (VA) loans are guaranteed by the Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) and  have different Debt to Income requirements than FHA loans, issued by the Federal Housing Administration. Your FHA loans will differ from what the DTI is for a Conventional Loan which are not guaranteed by any federal agency.
2. I always advise my clients to stay within their comfort zone and do not try to max out their loan to 100% of what a lender offers. The maximum loan amount is the absolute most your finances can handle, and if something suddenly changes You could find yourself in a financial bind.

When you meet with a Flagler Real Estate Team Member you will be asked to get a pre-qualification letter before we begin to show homes. This ensures that we are presenting to the Seller a Ready, Willing, and Able Buyer. This is a best practice to safeguard our clients and Sellers. We definitely want to help you start the process right so when we see the home we want we can immediately put in an offer. Remember the the home you saw today and want to think about is the same one someone saw yesterday and is ready to put an offer in on. When you find the home you love, stop shopping immediately and submit your offer!