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Welcome back to the series, Millennials Mortgage Process! In this post, I’ll give you a glimpse into the hectic first steps of the mortgage process, and just how quickly the pre-approval process takes in today’s digital mortgage world.
My fiancé and I officially started to look at houses. We were using Zillow to find houses/townhomes/and neighborhoods that were in our price range, and on a few of our favorites, the same ‘agent’ was listed. So, I hit the ‘Contact Agent’ button, and we were connected via email in minutes. Within a week, we had found, put an offer in for, and went under contract on a house.
YIKES.
The best piece of advice our agent gave us at the start was to get pre-approved for a mortgage. I had some hesitation initially, because I was concerned that we would ‘lock in’ to a rate and not find and close on a house within the timeframe given. Fortunately, we were able to see multiple houses everyday after work, and even though we weren’t in a rush, we could tell the home searching process would go quickly.
So, I reached out to a well-known mortgage company via their online form, just for the pre-approval.
Since its suggested that you ‘rate shop’ across companies for mortgages, my initial plan was to utilize the big guys for the pre-approval letter, then go to a smaller company with a family friend for the full mortgage. That never happened, because before I could navigate away from the ‘Thank you’ page, someone called me to confirm my phone number, name, and where I was looking to purchase. I was then connected with a loan officer and went over the basic information to start my application for pre-approval.
The total time it took for me to fill out the form, be connected to the loan officer, and then begin the pre-approval process was 30 minutes. In a half hour, I was already knee deep in the mortgage process. Everything was going smoothly until it came time for the credit check. Remember in my second blog how I talked about being vaguely aware of credit until the Equifax hack happened and then I froze my credit? Well, I forgot to unfreeze my credit.
A minor blip. The loan officer assured me it was an easy fix. A few hours later, after my credit had been unfrozen and several requested documents were emailed over, I was on the phone again with the loan officer and he was pulling my credit. I got an email later that day with the official pre-approval letter. Which was a good thing because by the weekend we not only toured a house, fell in love with it, and put an offer in with the pre-approval letter, but we had our offer accepted!
And then the “fun part” happened.
Attorney review period, inspection period, phone calls at random hours of the day, time off requested to be present at the inspection, losing sleep over if the seller would fix everything in the inspection report or not, re-reading the contract to see what we the buyers were responsible for versus the seller, and on and on. I honestly don’t remember July ending and August starting, but somewhere in the midst of all of the paperwork, emails, phone calls and text messages, we were officially under contract on a house. It really didn’t sink in until I saw the Initial Disclosure from the mortgage company.
But that’s a topic for a different blog post…
